Search and Learning for Unsupervised Text Generation New Faculty Highlights Extended Abstract

The following article is an extended abstract submitted as part of AAAI's New Faculty Highlights Program. With the advances of deep learning techniques, text generation is attracting increasing interest in the artificial intelligence (AI) commu- nity, because of its wide applications and because it is an essential component of AI. Traditional text generation systems are trained in a supervised way, requiring massive labeled parallel corpora. In this paper, I will introduce our recent work on search and learning ap- proaches to unsupervised text generation, where a heuristic objective function estimates the quality of a candidate sentence, and discrete search algorithms generate a sentence by maximizing the search objective. A machine learning model further learns from the search results to smooth out noise and improve efficiency.