Learning latent representations from long text sequences is an important
first step in many natural language processing applications. Recurrent Neural
Networks (RNNs) have become a cornerstone for this challenging task. However,
the quality of sentences during RNN-based decoding (reconstruction) decreases
with the length of the text. We propose a sequence-to-sequence, purely
convolutional and deconvolutional autoencoding framework that is free of the
above issue, while also being computationally efficient. The proposed method is
simple, easy to implement and can be leveraged as a building block for many
applications. We show empirically that compared to RNNs, our framework is
better at reconstructing and correcting long paragraphs. Quantitative
evaluation on semi-supervised text classification and summarization tasks
demonstrate the potential for better utilization of long unlabeled text data.

本研究通过提出一种基于卷积自编码的序列到序列的方法，解决了长文本序列编码与解码时 RNN 存在的问题，同时具有良好的重构和校正能力，适用于自然语言处理中众多应用。在半监督文本分类和摘要生成任务中的定量评估表明，该方法可以更好地利用长篇未标注的文本数据。