COMSCI 269: Advanced Topics in Natural Language Generation (2020 Fall)

Nanyun (Violet) Peng


Instruction (course introduction, overview of NLG history and basic techniques)

W1

Course overview, Intro to NLG, N-gram language models

Smoothing, log-linear language models, neural networks basics.

W2

Neural language models, MT and Sequence-to-Sequence models (conditional LMs)

Decoding methods (beam search, sampling)

Paper Presentations (3 weeks for methodology, 3 weeks for applications. Each class we present two papers on one topic.)

W3

Topic: Sequence to sequence models

·      Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate. https://arxiv.org/abs/1409.0473. Suggested supplementary readings: Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks http://papers.nips.cc/paper/5346-sequence-to-sequence-learning-with-neural-networks.pdf.

·      Attention is All You Need https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762

 

Topic: Autoregressive language models

·      Breaking the Softmax Bottleneck: A High-Rank RNN Language Model https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.03953

·      XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.08237. Suggested supplementary readings: GPT-2: Language Models are Unsupervised Multitask Learners https://www.techbooky.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Better-Language-Models-and-Their-Implications.pdf

 

W4

Topic: VAE-based generation

·      Auto-regressive Decoding: Generating Sentences from a Continuous Space. https://arxiv.org/abs/1511.06349

·      Avoiding Latent Variable Collapse with Generative Skip Models. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1807.04863.pdf

 

Topic: Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) for text

·      SeqGAN: Sequence Generative Adversarial Nets with Policy Gradient https://www.aaai.org/Conferences/AAAI/2017/PreliminaryPapers/12-Yu-L-14344.pdf

·      Language GANs Falling Short: https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.02549. Suggested supplementary readings: Evaluating Text GANs as Language Models. https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/N19-1233.pdf

 

W5

Topic: Insertion-based generation

·      Insertion Transformer: https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.03249. Suggested supplementary readings: Enabling Language Models to Fill in the Blanks. https://nlp.stanford.edu/pubs/donahue2020infilling.pdf

·      Non-monotonic Sequential Text Generation: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1902.02192.pdf

 

Topic: Controlled generation

·      Toward Controlled Generation of Text  https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.00955

·      Posterior Control of Blackbox Generation  https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.04560.pdf

 

W6

Topic: Summarization

·      Pointer Generator Network: https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.04368

·      Text Summarization with BERT: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1908.08345.pdf

 

Topic: Machine Translation

·      Dual Learning for Machine Translation. https://papers.nips.cc/paper/6469-dual-learning-for-machine-translation.pdf

·      BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.13461

 

W7

Topic: Dialog system

·      Personalizing Dialogue Agents: I have a dog, do you have pets too? https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.07243. Suggested reading: How NOT To Evaluate Your Dialogue System. https://arxiv.org/abs/1603.08023

·      Task-Oriented Dialogue as Dataflow Synthesis: https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.11423

 

Topic: Story generation

·      Hierarchical Neural Story Generation: https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.04833

·      Content Planning for Neural Story Generation with Aristotelian Rescoring: https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.09870. Suggested reading: Plan-and-Write: https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.05701

W8

Topic: Figurative language generation

·      Sarcasm generation: https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.13248

·      Simile generation: https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.08942

Topic: Poetry generation

·      Chinese Poetry Generation with Recurrent Neural Networks: https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/D14-1074.pdf

·      Generating Topical Poetry: https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/D16-1126/

 

Final Presentation (each team have 20 mins to present their project)

W9

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W10

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