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        <title>Piecewise Latent Variables for Neural Variational Text Processing</title>
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        <namePart type="given">Iulian</namePart>
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    <name type="personal">
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    <abstract>Advances in neural variational inference have facilitated the learning of powerful directed graphical models with continuous latent variables, such as variational autoencoders. The hope is that such models will learn to represent rich, multi-modal latent factors in real-world data, such as natural language text. However, current models often assume simplistic priors on the latent variables - such as the uni-modal Gaussian distribution - which are incapable of representing complex latent factors efficiently. To overcome this restriction, we propose the simple, but highly flexible, piecewise constant distribution. This distribution has the capacity to represent an exponential number of modes of a latent target distribution, while remaining mathematically tractable. Our results demonstrate that incorporating this new latent distribution into different models yields substantial improvements in natural language processing tasks such as document modeling and natural language generation for dialogue.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Piecewise Latent Variables for Neural Variational Text Processing
%A Serban, Iulian Vlad
%A Ororbia, Alexander G.
%A Pineau, Joelle
%A Courville, Aaron
%Y Palmer, Martha
%Y Hwa, Rebecca
%Y Riedel, Sebastian
%S Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
%D 2017
%8 September
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Copenhagen, Denmark
%F serban-etal-2017-piecewise
%X Advances in neural variational inference have facilitated the learning of powerful directed graphical models with continuous latent variables, such as variational autoencoders. The hope is that such models will learn to represent rich, multi-modal latent factors in real-world data, such as natural language text. However, current models often assume simplistic priors on the latent variables - such as the uni-modal Gaussian distribution - which are incapable of representing complex latent factors efficiently. To overcome this restriction, we propose the simple, but highly flexible, piecewise constant distribution. This distribution has the capacity to represent an exponential number of modes of a latent target distribution, while remaining mathematically tractable. Our results demonstrate that incorporating this new latent distribution into different models yields substantial improvements in natural language processing tasks such as document modeling and natural language generation for dialogue.
%R 10.18653/v1/D17-1043
%U https://aclanthology.org/D17-1043
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/D17-1043
%P 422-432

Markdown (Informal)

[Piecewise Latent Variables for Neural Variational Text Processing](https://aclanthology.org/D17-1043) (Serban et al., EMNLP 2017)

• Piecewise Latent Variables for Neural Variational Text Processing (Serban et al., EMNLP 2017)

ACL

• Iulian Vlad Serban, Alexander G. Ororbia, Joelle Pineau, and Aaron Courville. 2017. Piecewise Latent Variables for Neural Variational Text Processing. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 422–432, Copenhagen, Denmark. Association for Computational Linguistics.