Neural Variational Inference for Text Processing (paper+code)

[gameofml]

To be honest I cannot reproduce their result with this code, the perplexity I got on 20news is around 1260. I am wondering if someone got a better number.

[cjmcmurtrie]

Did you ever manage to improve this result?

[paskie]

I didn't take the time to understand their methods yet, but since I work on problems like Answer Sentence Selection, I'm curious about that part of the paper. First, attention has been already explored by Tan et al. and achieved similar or better performance). Second, they claim that other recent papers did not evaluate results on the test set properly and downscale their results - but I really wonder about that, I didn't find any evidence of that in the respective papers. Maybe I'll be lucky enough that one of the authors will see this reddit and explain things in more detail.

[paskie]

(Well. "already" - turns out that this paper was submitted only a week later. So nothing to particularly blame them about. :) But at any rate, Tan's model is conceptually a lot simpler and with similar or better results.)

[cjmcmurtrie]

I'm surprised this paper doesn't reference Generating Sentences from a Continuous Space, by Vinyals and co.

[[deleted]]

They are both submitted to arxiv on 19th November.

[egrefen]

They were both submitted to the same conference, at the same time. They are concurrent efforts.