Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for May
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NL Seminar-Neural Creative Language Generation PhD Defense Practice Talk
Fri, May 04, 2018 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Marjan Ghazvininejad , USC/ISI
Talk Title: Neural Creative Language Generation PhD Defense Practice Talk
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: Natural language generation is a well studied and still very challenging field in natural language processing. One of the less studied NLG tasks is the generation of creative texts such as jokes, puns, or poems. Multiple reasons contribute to the difficulty of research in this area. First, no immediate application exists for creative language generation. This has made the research on creative NLG extremely diverse, having different goals, assumptions, and constraints. Second, no quantitative measure exists for creative NLG tasks. Consequently, it is often difficult to tune the parameters of creative generation models and drive improvements to these systems. Lack of a quantitative metric and the absence of a well-defined immediate application makes comparing different methods and finding the state of the art an almost impossible task in this area. Finally, rule-based systems for creative language generation are not yet combined with deep learning methods. Rule based systems are powerful in capturing human knowledge, but it is often too time-consuming to present all the required knowledge in rules. On the other hand, deep learning models can automatically extract knowledge from the data, but they often miss out some essential knowledge that can be easily captured in rule based systems.
In this work, we address these challenges for poetry generation, which is one of the main areas of creative language generation. We introduce password poems as a new application for poetry generation. These passwords are highly secure, and we show that they are easier to recall and preferable compared to passwords created by other methods that guarantee the same level of security. Furthermore, we combine finite state machinery with deep learning models in a system for generating poems for any given topic. We introduce a quantitative metric for evaluating the generated poems and build the first interactive poetry generation system that enables users to revise system generated poems by adjusting style configuration settings like alliteration, concreteness and the sentiment of the poem. The system interface also allows users to rate the quality of the poem. We collect users rating for poems with various style settings and use them to automatically tune the system style parameters. In order to improve the coherence of generated poems, we introduce a method to borrow ideas from existing human literature and build a poetry translation system. We study how poetry translation is different from translation of noncreative texts by measuring the language variation added during the translation process. We show that humans translate poems much more freely compared to general texts. Based on this observation, we build a machine translation system specifically for translating poetry which uses language variation in the translation process to generate rhythmic and rhyming translations.
Biography: Marjan Ghazvininejad is a Ph.D. student at ISI working with Professor Kevin Knight
Host: Nanyun Peng
More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th Flr Conf Rm # 1135, Marina Del Rey
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Peter Zamar
Event Link: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
NL Seminar Towards Flexible but Controllable Language Generation
Fri, May 11, 2018 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Yulia Tsvetkov , CMU
Talk Title: Towards Flexible but Controllable Language Generation
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: To enable naturalistic, context aware language generation, the underlying models must be flexible but controllable. They must be flexible enough to account for the rich linguistic diversity of data that the model generates and conditions on. On the other hand, generation must be controlled, to lexicalize the same meaning differently, depending upon the social and the situational context. I will present model based approaches to multilingual language modeling and open vocabulary machine translation, aiming at making language generation more flexible by relaxing the unreasonable but prevalent in the literature assumption that a models vocabulary is constrained to a particular set of most frequent words in a particular language. Then, I will present an approach to controllable text generation that modulates social variables in generated text. I will conclude with an overview of ongoing research projects.
Biography: Yulia Tsvetkov is an assistant professor in the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research interests lie at or near the intersection of natural language processing, machine learning, linguistics, and social science. Her current research projects focus on multilinguality e.g., open vocabulary machine translation, polyglot models, entrainment in code switching, controllable text generation, automated negotiation, and NLP for social good e.g., identification of microaggressions and dehumanization in online interactions, identification of misinformation and agenda setting in news, predicting scientific misconduct. Prior to joining LTI, Yulia was a postdoc in the department of Computer Science at Stanford University she received her PhD from Carnegie Mellon University.
Host: Nanyun Peng
More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th Flr Conf Rm # 1135, Marina Del Rey
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Peter Zamar
Event Link: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor.
