Mohan Zhang

Mohan Zhang, Luchen Tan, Zhengkai Tu et al.

In the paraphrase generation task, source sentences often contain phrases that should not be altered. Which phrases, however, can be context dependent and can vary by application. Our solution to this challenge is to provide the user with explicit tags that can be placed around any arbitrary segment of text to mean "don't change me!" when generating a paraphrase; the model learns to explicitly copy these phrases to the output. The contribution of this work is a novel data generation technique using distant supervision that allows us to start with a pretrained sequence-to-sequence model and fine-tune a paraphrase generator that exhibits this behavior, allowing user-controllable paraphrase generation. Additionally, we modify the loss during fine-tuning to explicitly encourage diversity in model output. Our technique is language agnostic, and we report experiments in English and Chinese.

Shijia E, Yang Xiang, Mohan Zhang

We focus on the problem of learning distributed representations for entity search queries, named entities, and their short descriptions. With our representation learning models, the entity search query, named entity and description can be represented as low-dimensional vectors. Our goal is to develop a simple but effective model that can make the distributed representations of query related entities similar to the query in the vector space. Hence, we propose three kinds of learning strategies, and the difference between them mainly lies in how to deal with the relationship between an entity and its description. We analyze the strengths and weaknesses of each learning strategy and validate our methods on public datasets which contain four kinds of named entities, i.e., movies, TV shows, restaurants and celebrities. The experimental results indicate that our proposed methods can adapt to different types of entity search queries, and outperform the current state-of-the-art methods based on keyword matching and vanilla word2vec models. Besides, the proposed methods can be trained fast and be easily extended to other similar tasks.