Fake Sentence Detection as a Training Task for Sentence Encoding

Viresh Ranjan, Heeyoung Kwon, Niranjan Balasubramanian, Minh Hoai

Abstract:

Sentence encoders are typically trained on generative language modeling tasks with large unlabeled datasets. While these encoders achieve strong results on many sentence-level tasks, they are difficult to train with long training cycles.
We introduce fake sentence detection as a new discriminative training task for learning sentence encoders. We automatically generate fake sentences by corrupting original sentences from a source collection and train the encoders to produce representations that are effective at detecting fake sentences. This binary classification task turns to be quite efficient for training sentence encoders. We compare a basic BiLSTM encoder trained on this task with strong sentence encoding models (Skipthought and FastSent) trained on a language modeling task. We find that the BiLSTM trains much faster on fake sentence detection (20 hours instead of weeks) using smaller amounts of data (1M instead of 64M sentences). Further analysis shows the learned representations also capture many syntactic and semantic properties expected from good sentence representations.

Data: [BookCorpus](https://paperswithcode.com/dataset/bookcorpus), [COCO](https://paperswithcode.com/dataset/coco)