Optimus: Organizing Sentences via Pre-trained Modeling of a Latent Space

Chunyuan Li, Xiang Gao, Yuan Li, Baolin Peng, Xiujun Li, Yizhe Zhang, Jianfeng Gao


Abstract
When trained effectively, the Variational Autoencoder (VAE) can be both a powerful generative model and an effective representation learning framework for natural language. In this paper, we propose the first large-scale language VAE model Optimus (Organizing sentences via Pre-Trained Modeling of a Universal Space). A universal latent embedding space for sentences is first pre-trained on large text corpus, and then fine-tuned for various language generation and understanding tasks. Compared with GPT-2, Optimus enables guided language generation from an abstract level using the latent vectors. Compared with BERT, Optimus can generalize better on low-resource language understanding tasks due to the smooth latent space structure. Extensive experimental results on a wide range of language tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of Optimus. It achieves new state-of-the-art on VAE language modeling benchmarks.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.378
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Bonnie Webber, Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4678–4699
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.378
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.378
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Chunyuan Li, Xiang Gao, Yuan Li, Baolin Peng, Xiujun Li, Yizhe Zhang, and Jianfeng Gao. 2020. Optimus: Organizing Sentences via Pre-trained Modeling of a Latent Space. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 4678–4699, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Optimus: Organizing Sentences via Pre-trained Modeling of a Latent Space (Li et al., EMNLP 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.378.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38938906
Code
 ChunyuanLI/Optimus
Data
DailyDialogGLUEPenn TreebankQNLISNLIWebText