Recently, researches have explored the graph neural network (GNN) techniques on text classification, since GNN does well in handling complex structures and preserving global information. However, previous methods based on GNN are mainly faced with the practical problems of fixed corpus level graph structure which do not support online testing and high memory consumption. To tackle the problems, we propose a new GNN based model that builds graphs for each input text with global parameters sharing instead of a single graph for the whole corpus. This method removes the burden of dependence between an individual text and entire corpus which support online testing, but still preserve global information. Besides, we build graphs by much smaller windows in the text, which not only extract more local features but also significantly reduce the edge numbers as well as memory consumption. Experiments show that our model outperforms existing models on several text classification datasets even with consuming less memory.
We present CoTexT, a pre-trained, transformer-based encoder-decoder model that learns the representative context between natural language (NL) and programming language (PL). Using self-supervision, CoTexT is pre-trained on large programming language corpora to learn a general understanding of language and code. CoTexT supports downstream NL-PL tasks such as code summarizing/documentation, code generation, defect detection, and code debugging. We train CoTexT on different combinations of available PL corpus including both "bimodal" and "unimodal" data. Here, bimodal data is the combination of text and corresponding code snippets, whereas unimodal data is merely code snippets. We first evaluate CoTexT with multi-task learning: we perform Code Summarization on 6 different programming languages and Code Refinement on both small and medium size featured in the CodeXGLUE dataset. We further conduct extensive experiments to investigate CoTexT on other tasks within the CodeXGlue dataset, including Code Generation and Defect Detection. We consistently achieve SOTA results in these tasks, demonstrating the versatility of our models.
Conventionally, the radiologist prepares the diagnosis notes and shares them with the transcriptionist. Then the transcriptionist prepares a preliminary formatted report referring to the notes, and finally, the radiologist reviews the report, corrects the errors, and signs off. This workflow causes significant delays and errors in the report. In current research work, we focus on applications of NLP techniques like Information Extraction (IE) and domain-specific Knowledge Graph (KG) to automatically generate radiology reports from radiologist's dictation. This paper focuses on KG construction for each organ by extracting information from an existing large corpus of free-text radiology reports. We develop an information extraction pipeline that combines rule-based, pattern-based, and dictionary-based techniques with lexical-semantic features to extract entities and relations. Missing information in short dictation can be accessed from the KGs to generate pathological descriptions and hence the radiology report. Generated pathological descriptions evaluated using semantic similarity metrics, which shows 97% similarity with gold standard pathological descriptions. Also, our analysis shows that our IE module is performing better than the OpenIE tool for the radiology domain. Furthermore, we include a manual qualitative analysis from radiologists, which shows that 80-85% of the generated reports are correctly written, and the remaining are partially correct.
Formal verse poetry imposes strict constraints on the meter and rhyme scheme of poems. Most prior work on generating this type of poetry uses existing poems for supervision, which are difficult to obtain for most languages and poetic forms. In this work, we propose an unsupervised approach to generate poems following any given meter and rhyme scheme, without requiring any poetic text for training. Our method works by splitting a regular, non-poetic corpus into phrases, prepending control codes that describe the length and end rhyme of each phrase, and training a transformer language model in the augmented corpus. During inference, we build control codes for the desired meter and rhyme scheme, and condition our language model on them to generate formal verse poetry. Experiments in Spanish and Basque show that our approach is able to generate valid poems, which are often comparable in quality to those written by humans.
This work presents CLIPDraw, an algorithm that synthesizes novel drawings based on natural language input. CLIPDraw does not require any training; rather a pre-trained CLIP language-image encoder is used as a metric for maximizing similarity between the given description and a generated drawing. Crucially, CLIPDraw operates over vector strokes rather than pixel images, a constraint that biases drawings towards simpler human-recognizable shapes. Results compare between CLIPDraw and other synthesis-through-optimization methods, as well as highlight various interesting behaviors of CLIPDraw, such as satisfying ambiguous text in multiple ways, reliably producing drawings in diverse artistic styles, and scaling from simple to complex visual representations as stroke count is increased. Code for experimenting with the method is available at: https://colab.research.google.com/github/kvfrans/clipdraw/blob/main/clipdraw.ipynb
We introduce the first unsupervised speech synthesis system based on a simple, yet effective recipe. The framework leverages recent work in unsupervised speech recognition as well as existing neural-based speech synthesis. Using only unlabeled speech audio and unlabeled text as well as a lexicon, our method enables speech synthesis without the need for a human-labeled corpus. Experiments demonstrate the unsupervised system can synthesize speech similar to a supervised counterpart in terms of naturalness and intelligibility measured by human evaluation.
Sentence compression reduces the length of text by removing non-essential content while preserving important facts and grammaticality. Unsupervised objective driven methods for sentence compression can be used to create customized models without the need for ground-truth training data, while allowing flexibility in the objective function(s) that are used for learning and inference. Recent unsupervised sentence compression approaches use custom objectives to guide discrete search; however, guided search is expensive at inference time. In this work, we explore the use of reinforcement learning to train effective sentence compression models that are also fast when generating predictions. In particular, we cast the task as binary sequence labelling and fine-tune a pre-trained transformer using a simple policy gradient approach. Our approach outperforms other unsupervised models while also being more efficient at inference time.
The Variational Autoencoder (VAE) is a popular and powerful model applied to text modelling to generate diverse sentences. However, an issue known as posterior collapse (or KL loss vanishing) happens when the VAE is used in text modelling, where the approximate posterior collapses to the prior, and the model will totally ignore the latent variables and be degraded to a plain language model during text generation. Such an issue is particularly prevalent when RNN-based VAE models are employed for text modelling. In this paper, we propose a simple, generic architecture called Timestep-Wise Regularisation VAE (TWR-VAE), which can effectively avoid posterior collapse and can be applied to any RNN-based VAE models. The effectiveness and versatility of our model are demonstrated in different tasks, including language modelling and dialogue response generation.
We introduce a method for improving the structural understanding abilities of language models. Unlike previous approaches that finetune the models with task-specific augmentation, we pretrain language models on a collection of task-agnostic corpora to generate structures from text. Our structure pretraining enables zero-shot transfer of the learned knowledge that models have about the structure tasks. We study the performance of this approach on 28 datasets, spanning 10 structure prediction tasks including open information extraction, joint entity and relation extraction, named entity recognition, relation classification, semantic role labeling, event extraction, coreference resolution, factual probe, intent detection, and dialogue state tracking. We further enhance the pretraining with the task-specific training sets. We show that a 10B parameter language model transfers non-trivially to most tasks and obtains state-of-the-art performance on 21 of 28 datasets that we evaluate.
The prosody of a spoken word is determined by its surrounding context. In incremental text-to-speech synthesis, where the synthesizer produces an output before it has access to the complete input, the full context is often unknown which can result in a loss of naturalness in the synthesized speech. In this paper, we investigate whether the use of predicted future text can attenuate this loss. We compare several test conditions of next future word: (a) unknown (zero-word), (b) language model predicted, (c) randomly predicted and (d) ground-truth. We measure the prosodic features (pitch, energy and duration) and find that predicted text provides significant improvements over a zero-word lookahead, but only slight gains over random-word lookahead. We confirm these results with a perceptive test.