Improving Language Generation with Sentence Coherence Objective

Conditional story generation and contextual text continuation have become increasingly popular topics in NLP community. Existing models are often prone to output paragraphs of texts that gradually diverge from the given prompt. Although the generated text may have a reasonable perplexity and diversity, it could easily be identified by human as gibberish. The goal of our project is to improve the coherence and consistency across sentences in a language-generation model. We aim to solve this issue by first training a sentence pair coherence classifier with GPT-2 pretrained model, and then co-train the GPT-2 language model with this new coherence objective using a method analogous to the REINFORCE algorithm. This fine-tuned language model is able to generate lengthy paragraph conditioned on a given topic without diverging too much. The simplicity of this model allows it to be applicable to a variety of underlying language model architecture since it only modifies the final layer of the pre-trained model.

Transferable Natural Language Interface to Structured Queries aided by Adversarial Generation

A natural language interface (NLI) to structured query is intriguing due to its wide industrial applications and high economical values. In this work, we tackle the problem of domain adaptation for NLI with limited data on target domain. Two important approaches are considered: (a) effective general-knowledge-learning on source domain semantic parsing, and (b) data augmentation on target domain. We present a Structured Query Inference Network (SQIN) to enhance learning for domain adaptation, by separating schema information from NL and decoding SQL in a more structural-aware manner; we also propose a GAN-based augmentation technique (AugmentGAN) to mitigate the issue of lacking target domain data. We report solid results on GeoQuery, Overnight, and WikiSQL to demonstrate state-of-the-art performances for both in-domain and domain-transfer tasks.