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Language as a latent sequence: Deep latent variable models for semi-supervised paraphrase generation

Yu, Jialin, Cristea, Alexandra I, Harit, Anoushka, Sun, Zhongtian, Aduragba, Olanrewaju Tahir, Shi, Lei, Al Moubayed, Noura (2023) Language as a latent sequence: Deep latent variable models for semi-supervised paraphrase generation. AI Open, 4 . pp. 19-32. ISSN 2666-6510. (doi:10.1016/j.aiopen.2023.05.001) (KAR id:108675)

Abstract

This paper explores deep latent variable models for semi-supervised paraphrase generation, where the missing target pair for unlabelled data is modelled as a latent paraphrase sequence. We present a novel unsupervised model named variational sequence auto-encoding reconstruction (VSAR), which performs latent sequence inference given an observed text. To leverage information from text pairs, we additionally introduce a novel supervised model we call dual directional learning (DDL), which is designed to integrate with our proposed VSAR model. Combining VSAR with DDL (DDL+VSAR) enables us to conduct semi-supervised learning. Still, the combined model suffers from a cold-start problem. To further combat this issue, we propose an improved weight initialisation solution, leading to a novel two-stage training scheme we call knowledge-reinforced-learning (KRL). Our empirical evaluations suggest that the combined model yields competitive performance against the state-of-the-art supervised baselines on complete data. Furthermore, in scenarios where only a fraction of the labelled pairs are available, our combined model consistently outperforms the strong supervised model baseline (DDL) by a significant margin (p<.05; Wilcoxon test). Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/jialin-yu/latent-sequence-paraphrase.

Item Type: Article
DOI/Identification number: 10.1016/j.aiopen.2023.05.001
Subjects: Q Science > Q Science (General) > Q335 Artificial intelligence
Divisions: Divisions > Division of Computing, Engineering and Mathematical Sciences > School of Computing
Depositing User: Zhongtian Sun
Date Deposited: 06 Feb 2025 16:24 UTC
Last Modified: 12 Feb 2025 03:50 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/108675 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

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