Reputation: 1729
I'm in the overtures of designing a prose imitation system. It will read a bunch of prose, then mimic it. It's mostly for fun so the mimicking prose doesn't need to make too much sense, but I'd like to make it as good as I can, with a minimal amount of effort.
My first idea is to use my example prose to train a classifying feed-forward neural network, which classifies its input as either part of the training data or not part. Then I'd like to somehow invert the neural network, finding new random inputs that also get classified by the trained network as being part of the training data. The obvious and stupid way of doing this is to randomly generate word lists and only output the ones that get classified above a certain threshold, but I think there is a better way, using the network itself to limit the search to certain regions of the input space. For example, maybe you could start with a random vector and do gradient descent optimisation to find a local maximum around the random starting point. Is there a word for this kind of imitation process? What are some of the known methods?
Upvotes: 0
Views: 94
Reputation: 11397
How about Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN, Goodfellow 2014) and their more advanced siblings like Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks? There are plenty of proper research articles out there, and also more gentle introductions like this one on DCGAN and this on GAN. To quote the latter:
GANs are an interesting idea that were first introduced in 2014 by a group of researchers at the University of Montreal lead by Ian Goodfellow (now at OpenAI). The main idea behind a GAN is to have two competing neural network models. One takes noise as input and generates samples (and so is called the generator). The other model (called the discriminator) receives samples from both the generator and the training data, and has to be able to distinguish between the two sources. These two networks play a continuous game, where the generator is learning to produce more and more realistic samples, and the discriminator is learning to get better and better at distinguishing generated data from real data. These two networks are trained simultaneously, and the hope is that the competition will drive the generated samples to be indistinguishable from real data.
(DC)GAN should fit your task quite well.
Upvotes: 2