This repo contains the code and data of the following paper:
Educating Text Autoencoders: Latent Representation Guidance via Denoising
Tianxiao Shen, Jonas Mueller, Regina Barzilay, and Tommi Jaakkola

We support plain autoencoder (AE), variational autoencoder (VAE), adversarial autoencoder (AAE), Latent-noising AAE (LAAE), and Denoising AAE (DAAE).

Once the model is trained, it can be used to generate sentences, map sentences to a continuous space, perform sentence analogy and interpolation.

The code has been tested in Python 3.7, PyTorch 1.1

Download the processed Yelp and Yahoo datasets by running:

bash download_data.sh

The basic training command is:

python train.py --train data/yelp/train.txt --valid data/yelp/valid.txt --model_type aae --lambda_adv 10 --noise 0.3,0,0,0 --save-dir checkpoints/yelp/daae

To train various models, use the following options:

• AE: --model_type dae --save-dir checkpoints/yelp/ae
• VAE: --model_type vae --lambda_kl 0.1 --save-dir checkpoints/yelp/vae_kl0.1
• AAE: --model_type aae --lambda_adv 10 --save-dir checkpoints/yelp/aae
• LAAE: --model_type aae --lambda_adv 10 --lambda_p 0.01 --save-dir checkpoints/yelp/aae_p0.01
• DAAE: --model_type aae --lambda_adv 10 --noise 0.3,0,0,0 --save-dir checkpoints/yelp/daae, where --noise P,P,P,K specifies word drop probability, word blank probability, word substitute probability, max word shuffle distance, respectively

Run python train.py -h to see all training options.

After training, the model can be used for different tasks.

To reconstruct input data, run:

python test.py --reconstruct --data data/yelp/test.txt --output test --checkpoint checkpoints/yelp/daae/

To generate sentences from the model, run:

python test.py --sample --n 10000 --output sample --checkpoint checkpoints/yelp/daae/

To perform sentence manipulation via vector arithmetic, run:

python test.py --arithmetic --data data/yelp/tense/valid.past,data/yelp/tense/valid.present,data/yelp/tense/test.past --output test.past2present --checkpoint checkpoints/yelp/daae/
python test.py --arithmetic --k 2 --data data/yelp/sentiment/100.neg,data/yelp/sentiment/100.pos,data/yelp/sentiment/1000.neg --output 1000.neg2pos --checkpoint checkpoints/yelp/daae/

where the difference between the average latent representation of the first two data files will be applied to the third file (separated by commas), and k denotes the scaling factor.

To perform sentence interpolation between two data files (separated by a comma), run:

python test.py --interpolate --data data/yelp/interpolate/example.long,data/yelp/interpolate/example.short --output example.int --checkpoint checkpoints/yelp/daae/

The output file will be stored in the checkpoint directory.