Abstract Previouswork in slogan generation focused on utilising slogan skeletons mined from existing slogans. While some generated slogans can be catchy, they are often not coherent with the company’s focus or style across their marketing communications because the skeletons are mined from other companies’ slogans. We propose a sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) Transformer model to generate slogans from a brief company description. A naïve seq2seq model fine-tuned for slogan generation is prone to introducing false information. We use company name delexicalisation and entity masking to alleviate this problem and improve the generated slogans’ quality and truthfulness. Furthermore, we apply conditional training based on the first words’ part-of-speech tag to generate syntactically diverse slogans. Our best model achieved a ROUGE-1/-2/-L $\mathrm{F}_1$ score of 35.58/18.47/33.32. Besides, automatic and human evaluations indicate that our method generates significantly more factual, diverse and catchy slogans than strong long short-term memory and Transformer seq2seq baselines.

Abstract In real-world applications, text classification models often suffer from a lack of accurately labelled documents. The available labelled documents may also be out of domain, making the trained model not able to perform well in the target domain. In this work, we mitigate the data problem of text classification using a two-stage approach. First, we mine representative keywords from a noisy out-of-domain data set using statistical methods. We then apply a dataless classification method to learn from the automatically selected keywords and unlabelled in-domain data. The proposed approach outperformed various supervised learning and dataless classification baselines by a large margin. We evaluated different keyword selection methods intrinsically and extrinsically by measuring their impact on the dataless classification accuracy. Last but not least, we conducted an in-depth analysis of the behaviour of the classifier and explained why the proposed dataless classification method outperformed supervised learning counterparts.

Nontawat Charoenphakdee, Jongyeong Lee, Yiping Jin, Dittaya Wanvarie, Masashi Sugiyama. Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP). 2019.

In this paper we propose a lightly-supervised framework to rapidly build text classifiers for contextual advertising. Traditionally text classification techniques require labeled training documents for each predefined class. In the scenario of contextual advertising, advertisers often want to target to a specific class of webpages most relevant to their product or service, which may not be covered by a pre-trained classifier. Moreover, the advertisers are interested in whether a webpage is “relevant” or “irrelevant”. It is time-consuming to solicit the advertisers for reliable training signals for the negative class. Therefore, it is more suitable to model the problem as a one-class classification problem, in contrast to traditional classification problems where disjoint classes are defined a priori. We first apply two state-of-the-art lightly-supervised classification models, generalized expectation (GE) criteria (Druck et al., 2008) and multinomial naive Bayes (MNB) with priors (Settles, 2011) to one-class classification where the user only needs to provide a small list of labeled words for the target class. To combine the strengths of the two models, we fuse them together by using MNB to automatically enrich the constraints for GE training. We also explore ensemble method to combine classifiers. On a corpus of webpages from real-time bidding requests, the proposed model achieves the highest average F1 of 0.69 and closes more than half of the gap between previous state-of-the-art lightly-supervised models to a fully-supervised MaxEnt model.