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The article is focused on automatic development and ranking of a large corpus for Russian paraphrase generation which proves to be the first corpus of such type in Russian computational linguistics. Existing manually annotated paraphrase datasets for Russian are limited to small-sized ParaPhraser corpus and ParaPlag which are suitable for a set of NLP tasks, such as paraphrase and plagiarism detection, sentence similarity and relatedness estimation, etc. Due to size restrictions, these datasets can hardly be applied in end-to-end text generation solutions. Meanwhile, paraphrase generation requires a large amount of training data. In our study we propose a solution to the problem: we collect, rank and evaluate a new publicly available headline paraphrase corpus (ParaPhraser Plus), and then perform text generation experiments with manual evaluation on automatically ranked corpora using the Universal Transformer architecture.
This paper describes the third place submission to the shared task on simultaneous translation and paraphrasing for language education at the 4th workshop on Neural Generation and Translation (WNGT) for ACL 2020. The final system leverages pre-trained translation models and uses a Transformer architecture combined with an oversampling strategy to achieve a competitive performance. This system significantly outperforms the baseline on Hungarian (27% absolute improvement in Weighted Macro F1 score) and Portuguese (33% absolute improvement) languages.
The answer-agnostic question generation is a significant and challenging task, which aims to automatically generate questions for a given sentence but without an answer. In this paper, we propose two new strategies to deal with this task: question type prediction and copy loss mechanism. The question type module is to predict the types of questions that should be asked, which allows our model to generate multiple types of questions for the same source sentence. The new copy loss enhances the original copy mechanism to make sure that every important word in the source sentence has been copied when generating questions. Our integrated model outperforms the state-of-the-art approach in answer-agnostic question generation, achieving a BLEU-4 score of 13.9 on SQuAD. Human evaluation further validates the high quality of our generated questions. We will make our code public available for further research.
We propose a novel procedure for training multiple Transformers with tied parameters which compresses multiple models into one enabling the dynamic choice of the number of encoder and decoder layers during decoding. In training an encoder-decoder model, typically, the output of the last layer of the N-layer encoder is fed to the M-layer decoder, and the output of the last decoder layer is used to compute loss. Instead, our method computes a single loss consisting of NxM losses, where each loss is computed from the output of one of the M decoder layers connected to one of the N encoder layers. Such a model subsumes NxM models with different number of encoder and decoder layers, and can be used for decoding with fewer than the maximum number of encoder and decoder layers. Given our flexible tied model, we also address to a-priori selection of the number of encoder and decoder layers for faster decoding, and explore recurrent stacking of layers and knowledge distillation for model compression. We present a cost-benefit analysis of applying the proposed approaches for neural machine translation and show that they reduce decoding costs while preserving translation quality.