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Virginia Tech

Data Augmentation with Seq2Seq Models

Abstract

dc:description.abstract

Paraphrase sparsity is an issue that complicates the training process of question answering systems: syntactically diverse but semantically equivalent sentences can have significant disparities in predicted output probabilities. We propose a method for generating an augmented paraphrase corpus for the visual question answering system to make it more robust to paraphrases. This corpus is generated by concatenating two sequence to sequence models. In order to generate diverse paraphrases, we sample the neural network using diverse beam search. We evaluate the results on the standard VQA validation set. Our approach results in a significantly expanded training dataset and vocabulary size, but has slightly worse performance when tested on the validation split. Although not as fruitful as we had hoped, our work highlights additional avenues for investigation into selecting more optimal model parameters and the development of a more sophisticated paraphrase filtering algorithm. The primary contribution of this work is the demonstration that decent paraphrases can be generated from sequence to sequence models and the development of a pipeline for developing an augmented dataset.

Degree

thesis:*
Name thesis:degree_name
Master of Science
Level thesis:degree_level
masters
Discipline thesis:degree_discipline
Electrical Engineering
Department dc:contributor.department
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Grantor dc:publisher
Virginia Tech
Year dc:date.issued
2017

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • Granstedt, Jason Louis
Chair dc:contributor.committeechair
  • Batra, Dhruv
Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember
  • Baumann, William T.
  • Huang, Bert

Subjects

dc:subject × 4

Rights

dc:rights
Statement dc:rights
  • In Copyright

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
Dc Identifier Other
vt_gsexam:10139
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/78315

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
Virginia Tech
Base URL
vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/oai/request
Last updated
2026-07-22
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
citation

Granstedt, Jason Louis. Data Augmentation with Seq2Seq Models. masters thesis, Virginia Tech, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/78315