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Poster
Can Unconditional Language Models Recover Arbitrary Sentences?
Nishant Subramani · Samuel Bowman · Kyunghyun Cho

Thu Dec 12 05:00 PM -- 07:00 PM (PST) @ East Exhibition Hall B + C #131
in Applications -- Natural Language Processing »

Neural network-based generative language models like ELMo and BERT can work effectively as general purpose sentence encoders in text classification without further fine-tuning. Is it possible to adapt them in a similar way for use as general-purpose decoders? For this to be possible, it would need to be the case that for any target sentence of interest, there is some continuous representation that can be passed to the language model to cause it to reproduce that sentence. We set aside the difficult problem of designing an encoder that can produce such representations and, instead, ask directly whether such representations exist at all. To do this, we introduce a pair of effective, complementary methods for feeding representations into pretrained unconditional language models and a corresponding set of methods to map sentences into and out of this representation space, the reparametrized sentence space. We then investigate the conditions under which a language model can be made to generate a sentence through the identification of a point in such a space and find that it is possible to recover arbitrary sentences nearly perfectly with language models and representations of moderate size without modifying any model parameters.

Keywords: Applications -> Natural Language Processing · Algorithms -> Representation Learning; Deep Learning

Author Information

Nishant Subramani (AI Foundation)
Samuel Bowman (New York University)
Kyunghyun Cho (New York University)

Kyunghyun Cho is an associate professor of computer science and data science at New York University and a research scientist at Facebook AI Research. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Université de Montréal until summer 2015 under the supervision of Prof. Yoshua Bengio, and received PhD and MSc degrees from Aalto University early 2014 under the supervision of Prof. Juha Karhunen, Dr. Tapani Raiko and Dr. Alexander Ilin. He tries his best to find a balance among machine learning, natural language processing, and life, but almost always fails to do so.

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