Multimodal headline utilizes both video frames and transcripts to generate the natural language title of the videos. Due to a lack of large-scale, manually annotated data, the task of annotating grounded headlines for video is labor intensive and impractical. Previous researches on pre-trained language models and video-language models have achieved significant progress in related downstream tasks. However, none of them can be directly applied to multimodal headline architecture where we need both multimodal encoder and sentence decoder. A major challenge in simply gluing language model and video-language model is the modality balance, which is aimed at combining visual-language complementary abilities. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to graft the video encoder from the pre-trained video-language model on the generative pre-trained language model. We also present a consensus fusion mechanism for the integration of different components, via inter/intra modality relation. Empirically, experiments show that the grafted model achieves strong results on a brand-new dataset collected from real-world applications.

Variational autoencoders (VAEs) combine latent variables with amortized variational inference, whose optimization usually converges into a trivial local optimum termed posterior collapse, especially in text modeling. By tracking the optimization dynamics, we observe the encoder-decoder incompatibility that leads to poor parameterizations of the data manifold. We argue that the trivial local optimum may be avoided by improving the encoder and decoder parameterizations since the posterior network is part of a transition map between them. To this end, we propose Coupled-VAE, which couples a VAE model with a deterministic autoencoder with the same structure and improves the encoder and decoder parameterizations via encoder weight sharing and decoder signal matching. We apply the proposed Coupled-VAE approach to various VAE models with different regularization, posterior family, decoder structure, and optimization strategy. Experiments on benchmark datasets (i.e., PTB, Yelp, and Yahoo) show consistently improved results in terms of probability estimation and richness of the latent space. We also generalize our method to conditional language modeling and propose Coupled-CVAE, which largely improves the diversity of dialogue generation on the Switchboard dataset.

Self-supervised pre-training, such as BERT, MASS and BART, has emerged as a powerful technique for natural language understanding and generation. Existing pre-training techniques employ autoencoding and/or autoregressive objectives to train Transformer-based models by recovering original word tokens from corrupted text with some masked tokens. The training goals of existing techniques are often inconsistent with the goals of many language generation tasks, such as generative question answering and conversational response generation, for producing new text given context. This work presents PALM with a novel scheme that jointly pre-trains an autoencoding and autoregressive language model on a large unlabeled corpus, specifically designed for generating new text conditioned on context. The new scheme alleviates the mismatch introduced by the existing denoising scheme between pre-training and fine-tuning where generation is more than reconstructing original text. An extensive set of experiments show that PALM achieves new state-of-the-art results on a variety of language generation benchmarks covering generative question answering (Rank 1 on the official MARCO leaderboard), abstractive summarization on CNN/DailyMail as well as Gigaword, question generation on SQuAD, and conversational response generation on Cornell Movie Dialogues.

Unsupervised text style transfer aims to alter text styles while preserving the content, without aligned data for supervision. Existing seq2seq methods face three challenges: 1) the transfer is weakly interpretable, 2) generated outputs struggle in content preservation, and 3) the trade-off between content and style is intractable. To address these challenges, we propose a hierarchical reinforced sequence operation method, named Point-Then-Operate (PTO), which consists of a high-level agent that proposes operation positions and a low-level agent that alters the sentence. We provide comprehensive training objectives to control the fluency, style, and content of the outputs and a mask-based inference algorithm that allows for multi-step revision based on the single-step trained agents. Experimental results on two text style transfer datasets show that our method significantly outperforms recent methods and effectively addresses the aforementioned challenges.

Commonsense and background knowledge is required for a QA model to answer many nontrivial questions. Different from existing work on knowledge-aware QA, we focus on a more challenging task of leveraging external knowledge to generate answers in natural language for a given question with context. In this paper, we propose a new neural model, Knowledge-Enriched Answer Generator (KEAG), which is able to compose a natural answer by exploiting and aggregating evidence from all four information sources available: question, passage, vocabulary and knowledge. During the process of answer generation, KEAG adaptively determines when to utilize symbolic knowledge and which fact from the knowledge is useful. This allows the model to exploit external knowledge that is not explicitly stated in the given text, but that is relevant for generating an answer. The empirical study on public benchmark of answer generation demonstrates that KEAG improves answer quality over models without knowledge and existing knowledge-aware models, confirming its effectiveness in leveraging knowledge.

This paper describes a novel hierarchical attention network for reading comprehension style question answering, which aims to answer questions for a given narrative paragraph. In the proposed method, attention and fusion are conducted horizontally and vertically across layers at different levels of granularity between question and paragraph. Specifically, it first encode the question and paragraph with fine-grained language embeddings, to better capture the respective representations at semantic level. Then it proposes a multi-granularity fusion approach to fully fuse information from both global and attended representations. Finally, it introduces a hierarchical attention network to focuses on the answer span progressively with multi-level soft-alignment. Extensive experiments on the large-scale SQuAD, TriviaQA dataset validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. At the time of writing the paper, our model achieves state-of-the-art on the both SQuAD and TriviaQA Wiki leaderboard as well as two adversarial SQuAD datasets.