Su Wang

• PhD student in Computational Linguistics, UT Austin
• Research Assistant at University of Texas at Austin

We propose a method for controlled narrative/story generation where we are able to guide the model to produce coherent narratives with user-specified target endings by interpolation: for example, we are told that Jim went hiking and at the end Jim needed to be rescued, and we want the model to incrementally generate steps along the way. The core of...

The news coverage of events often contains not one but multiple incompatible accounts of what happened. We develop a query-based system that extracts compatible sets of events (scenarios) from such data, formulated as one-class clustering. Our system incrementally evaluates each event's compatibility with already selected events, taking order into...

Paraphrasing is rooted in semantics. We show the effectiveness of transformers (Vaswani et al. 2017) for paraphrase generation and further improvements by incorporating PropBank labels via a multi-encoder. Evaluating on MSCOCO and WikiAnswers, we find that transformers are fast and effective, and that semantic augmentation for both transformers and...

Paraphrasing is rooted in semantics. We show the effectiveness of transformers (Vaswani et al. 2017) for paraphrase generation and further improvements by incorporating PropBank labels via a multi-encoder. Evaluating on MSCOCO and WikiAnswers, we find that transformers are fast and effective, and that semantic augmentation for both transformers and...

During natural disasters and conflicts, information about what happened is often confusing, messy, and distributed across many sources. We would like to be able to automatically identify relevant information and assemble it into coherent narratives of what happened. To make this task accessible to neural models, we introduce Story Salads, mixtures...

Paraphrasing is rooted in semantics. We show the effectiveness of transformers (Vaswani et al. 2017) for paraphrase generation and further improvements by incorporating PropBank labels via a multi-encoder. Evaluating on MSCOCO and WikiAnswers, we find that transformers are fast and effective, and that semantic augmentation for both transformers and...

Distributional data tells us that a man can swallow candy, but not that a man can swallow a paintball, since this is never attested. However both are physically plausible events. This paper introduces the task of semantic plausibility: recognizing plausible but possibly novel events. We present a new crowdsourced dataset of semantic plausibility ju...

Distributional data tells us that a man can swallow candy, but not that a man can swallow a paintball, since this is never attested. However both are physically plausible events. This paper introduces the task of semantic plausibility: recognizing plausible but possibly novel events. We present a new crowdsourced dataset of semantic plausibility ju...

We explore techniques to maximize the effectiveness of discourse information in the task of authorship attribution. We present a novel method to embed discourse features in a Convolutional Neural Network text classifier, which achieves a state-of-the-art result by a substantial margin. We empirically investigate several featurization methods to und...

We explore techniques to maximize the effectiveness of discourse information in the task of authorship attribution. We present a novel method to embed discourse features in a Convolutional Neural Network text classifier, which achieves a state-of-the-art result by a substantial margin. We empirically investigate several featuriza-tion methods to un...

We test whether distributional models can do one-shot learning of definitional properties from text only. Using Bayesian models, we find that first learning overar-ching structure in the known data, regularities in textual contexts and in properties, helps one-shot learning, and that individual context items can be highly informative. Our experimen...

I present an in-detail introduction to Topic Models (TM), a family of probabilistic models for (mainly) document modeling. I introduce and motivate the model, and illustrate its applications in Natural Language Processing (NLP), with the particular focus on a thorough description and derivation of the common inference algorithms proposed for TMs. I...

In this tutorial, I present an intuitive introduction to the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), invented by Ian Goodfellow of Google Brain, overview the general idea of the model, and describe the algorithm for training it as per the original work. I further briefly introduce the application of GAN in Natural Language Processing to show its flex...