AriEL: Volume Coding for Sentence Generation Comparisons

Mapping sequences of discrete data to a point in a continuous space makes it difficult to retrieve those sequences via random sampling. Mapping the input to a volume would make it easier to retrieve at test time, and that is the strategy followed by the family of approaches based on Variational Autoencoder. However the fact that they are at the same time optimizing for prediction and for smoothness of representation, forces them to trade-off between the two. We benchmark the performance of some of the standard methods in deep learning to generate sentences by uniformly sampling a continuous space. We do it by proposing AriEL, that constructs volumes in a continuous space, without the need of encouraging the creation of volumes through the loss function. We first benchmark on a toy grammar, that allows to automatically evaluate the language learned and generated by the models. Then, we benchmark on a real dataset of human dialogues. Our results indicate that the random access to the stored information can be significantly improved, since our method AriEL is able to generate a wider variety of correct language by randomly sampling the latent space. VAE follows in performance for the toy dataset while, AE and Transformer follow for the real dataset. This partially supports the hypothesis that encoding information into volumes instead of into points, leads to improved retrieval of learned information with random sampling. We hope this analysis can clarify directions to lead to better generators.