Deconvolutional Latent-Variable Model for Text Sequence Matching

2018-02-08

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 32

Volume

Thirty-Second AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2018

Main Track: NLP and Machine Learning

A latent-variable model is introduced for text matching, inferring sentence representations by jointly optimizing generative and discriminative objectives. To alleviate typical optimization challenges in latent-variable models for text, we employ deconvolutional networks as the sequence decoder (generator), providing learned latent codes with more semantic information and better generalization. Our model, trained in an unsupervised manner, yields stronger empirical predictive performance than a decoder based on Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), with less parameters and considerably faster training. Further, we apply it to text sequence-matching problems. The proposed model significantly outperforms several strong sentence-encoding baselines, especially in the semi-supervised setting.

10.1609/aaai.v32i1.11991