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Poster
Sequence Generation with Mixed Representations
Lijun Wu · Shufang Xie · Yingce Xia · Yang Fan · Jian-Huang Lai · Tao Qin · Tie-Yan Liu

Thu Jul 16 06:00 AM -- 06:45 AM &amp; Thu Jul 16 06:00 PM -- 06:45 PM (PDT) @ None #None
Tokenization is the first step of many natural language processing (NLP) tasks and plays an important role for neural NLP models. Tokenizaton method such as byte-pair encoding (BPE), which can greatly reduce the large vocabulary and deal with out-of-vocabulary words, has shown to be effective and is widely adopted for sequence generation tasks. While various tokenization methods exist, there is no common acknowledgement which is the best. In this work, we propose to leverage the mixed representations from different tokenization methods for sequence generation tasks, in order to boost the model performance with unique characteristics and advantages of individual tokenization methods. Specifically, we introduce a new model architecture to incorporate mixed representations and a co-teaching algorithm to better utilize the diversity of different tokenization methods. Our approach achieves significant improvements on neural machine translation (NMT) tasks with six language pairs (e.g., English$\leftrightarrow$German, English$\leftrightarrow$Romanian), as well as an abstractive summarization task.

#### Author Information

##### Tie-Yan Liu (Microsoft Research Asia)

Tie-Yan Liu is a principal researcher of Microsoft Research Asia, leading the research on artificial intelligence and machine learning. He is very well known for his pioneer work on learning to rank and computational advertising, and his recent research interests include deep learning, reinforcement learning, and distributed machine learning. Many of his technologies have been transferred to Microsoft’s products and online services (such as Bing, Microsoft Advertising, and Azure), and open-sourced through Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit (CNTK), Microsoft Distributed Machine Learning Toolkit (DMTK), and Microsoft Graph Engine. On the other hand, he has been actively contributing to academic communities. He is an adjunct/honorary professor at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), University of Nottingham, and several other universities in China. His papers have been cited for tens of thousands of times in refereed conferences and journals. He has won quite a few awards, including the best student paper award at SIGIR (2008), the most cited paper award at Journal of Visual Communications and Image Representation (2004-2006), the research break-through award (2012) and research-team-of-the-year award (2017) at Microsoft Research, and Top-10 Springer Computer Science books by Chinese authors (2015), and the most cited Chinese researcher by Elsevier (2017). He has been invited to serve as general chair, program committee chair, local chair, or area chair for a dozen of top conferences including SIGIR, WWW, KDD, ICML, NIPS, IJCAI, AAAI, ACL, ICTIR, as well as associate editor of ACM Transactions on Information Systems, ACM Transactions on the Web, and Neurocomputing. Tie-Yan Liu is a fellow of the IEEE, a distinguished member of the ACM, and a vice chair of the CIPS information retrieval technical committee.