  Most recent approaches use the sequence-to-sequence model for paraphrase
generation. The existing sequence-to-sequence model tends to memorize the words
and the patterns in the training dataset instead of learning the meaning of the
words. Therefore, the generated sentences are often grammatically correct but
semantically improper. In this work, we introduce a novel model based on the
encoder-decoder framework, called Word Embedding Attention Network (WEAN). Our
proposed model generates the words by querying distributed word representations
(i.e. neural word embeddings), hoping to capturing the meaning of the according
words. Following previous work, we evaluate our model on two
paraphrase-oriented tasks, namely text simplification and short text
abstractive summarization. Experimental results show that our model outperforms
the sequence-to-sequence baseline by the BLEU score of 6.3 and 5.5 on two
English text simplification datasets, and the ROUGE-2 F1 score of 5.7 on a
Chinese summarization dataset. Moreover, our model achieves state-of-the-art
performances on these three benchmark datasets.
