Applied Stats Workshop (Gov 3009)

The Applied Statistics Workshop (Gov 3009) meets all academic year, Wednesdays, 12pm-1:30pm, in CGIS K354. This workshop is a forum for advanced graduate students, faculty, and visiting scholars to present and discuss methodological or empirical work in progress in an interdisciplinary setting. The workshop features a tour of Harvard's statistical innovations and applications with weekly stops in different fields and disciplines and includes occasional presentations by invited speakers. Free lunch is provided. Tianxiao Shen presents, "Language Style Transfer" Abstract: Recent advances in text generation tasks such as machine translation and summarization rely on the use of massive amounts of parallel data, which is costly to collect or nonexistent in many scenarios. In this talk, I will present a novel model to perform style transfer on the basis of non-parallel text. This is an instance of a broad family of problems including machine translation, decipherment, and sentiment modification. I will talk about how we deal with the challenge to disentangle content from style, as well as the techniques we use for adversarial training over discrete samples. I will conclude with the experiments we design which allow qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the effectiveness of our method.