TASK DEFINITION: In this task, you are given a part of an article. Your task is to generate headline (title) for this text. Preferred headlines are under fifteen words.
PROBLEM: Multi Sentence Compression (MSC) is of great value to many real world applications, such as guided microblog summarization, opinion summarization and newswire summarization. Recently, word graph-based approaches have been proposed and become popular in MSC. Their key assumption is that redundancy among a set of related sentences provides a reliable way to generate informative and grammatical sentences. In this paper, we propose an effective approach to enhance the word graph-based MSC and tackle the issue that most of the state-of-the-art MSC approaches are confronted with: i.e., improving both informativity and grammaticality at the same time. Our approach consists of three main components: (1) a merging method based on Multiword Expressions (MWE); (2) a mapping strategy based on synonymy between words; (3) a re-ranking step to identify the best compression candidates generated using a POS-based language model (POS-LM). We demonstrate the effectiveness of this novel approach using a dataset made of clusters of English newswire sentences. The observed improvements on informativity and grammaticality of the generated compressions show that our approach is superior to state-of-the-art MSC methods.

SOLUTION: On Improving Informativity and Grammaticality for Multi-Sentence Compression

PROBLEM: In neural machine translation (NMT), generation of a target word depends on both source and target contexts. We find that source contexts have a direct impact on the adequacy of a translation while target contexts on the fluency. Intuitively, generation of a content word should rely more on the source context and generation of a functional word should rely more on the target context. Due to lack of effective control on the influence from source and target contexts, conventional NMT tends to yield fluent but inadequate translations. To address this problem, we propose to use context gates to dynamically control the ratios at which source and target contexts contribute to the generation of target words. In this way, we can enhance the adequacy of NMT while keeping the fluency unchanged. Experiments show that our approach significantly improves upon a standard attention-based NMT system by +2.3 BLEU points.

SOLUTION: Context Gates for Neural Machine Translation

PROBLEM: In this paper, we present the DifferenceBased Causality Learner (DBCL), an algorithm for learning a class of discrete-time dynamic models that represents all causation across time by means of difference equations driving change in a system. We motivate this representation with real-world mechanical systems and prove DBCL’s correctness for learning structure from time series data, an endeavour that is complicated by the existence of latent derivatives that have to be detected. We also prove that, under common assumptions for causal discovery, DBCL will identify the presence or absence of feedback loops, making the model more useful for predicting the effects of manipulating variables when the system is in equilibrium. We argue analytically and show empirically the advantages of DBCL over vector autoregression (VAR) and Granger causality models as well as modified forms of Bayesian and constraintbased structure discovery algorithms. Finally, we show that our algorithm can discover causal directions of alpha rhythms in human brains from EEG data.

SOLUTION:
Learning Why Things Change: The Difference-Based Causality Learner