A Structured Latent Variable Recurrent Network With Stochastic Attention For Generating Weibo Comments

A Structured Latent Variable Recurrent Network With Stochastic Attention For Generating Weibo Comments

Shijie Yang, Liang Li, Shuhui Wang, Weigang Zhang, Qingming Huang, Qi Tian

Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 3962-3968. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2020/548

Building intelligent agents to generate realistic Weibo comments is challenging. For such realistic Weibo comments, the key criterion is improving diversity while maintaining coherency. Considering that the variability of linguistic comments arises from multi-level sources, including both discourse-level properties and word-level selections, we improve the comment diversity by leveraging such inherent hierarchy. In this paper, we propose a structured latent variable recurrent network, which exploits the hierarchical-structured latent variables with stochastic attention to model the variations of comments. First, we endow both discourse-level and word-level latent variables with hierarchical and temporal dependencies for constructing multi-level hierarchy. Second, we introduce a stochastic attention to infer the key-words of interest in the input post. As a result, diverse comments can be generated with both discourse-level properties and local-word selections. Experiments on open-domain Weibo data show that our model generates more diverse and realistic comments.
Keywords:
Natural Language Processing: Natural Language Generation
Natural Language Processing: NLP Applications and Tools
Machine Learning: Deep Generative Models