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We consider neural language generation under a novel problem setting: generating the words of a sentence according to the order of their first appearance in its lexicalized PCFG parse tree, in a depth-first, left-to-right manner. Unlike previous tree-based language generation methods, our approach is both (i) topdown and (ii) explicitly generating syntactic structure at the same time. In addition, our method combines neural model with symbolic approach: word choice at each step is constrained by its predicted syntactic function. We applied our model to the task of dialog response generation, and found it significantly improves over sequence-to-sequence baseline, in terms of diversity and relevance. We also investigated the effect of lexicalization on language generation, and found that lexicalization schemes that give priority to content words have certain advantages over those focusing on dependency relations.
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Spell Once, Summon Anywhere: A Two-Level Open-Vocabulary Language Model
We show how the spellings of known words can help us deal with unknown words in open-vocabulary NLP tasks. The method we propose can be used to extend any closedvocabulary generative model, but in this paper we specifically consider the case of neural language modeling. Our Bayesian generative story combines a standard RNN language model (generating the word tokens in each sentence) with an RNNbased spelling model (generating the letters in each word type). These two RNNs respectively capture sentence structure and word structure, and are kept separate as in linguistics. By invoking the second RNN to generate spellings for novel words in context, we obtain an open-vocabulary language model. For known words, embeddings are naturally inferred by combining evidence from type spelling and token context. Comparing to baselines (including a novel strong baseline), we beat previous work and establish state-of-the-art results on multiple datasets.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1718846
- PAR ID:
- 10345020
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
- Volume:
- 33
- ISSN:
- 2159-5399
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 6843 to 6850
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v33i01.33016843
