In this task, you will be presented with a context from an academic paper and a question separated with a 
. You have to answer the question based on the context.

We compare our HR-VAE model with three strong baselines using VAE for text modelling:

VAE-LSTM-base: A variational autoencoder model which uses LSTM for both encoder and decoder. KL annealing is used to tackled the latent variable collapse issue BIBREF0;

VAE-CNN: A variational autoencoder model with a LSTM encoder and a dilated CNN decoder BIBREF7;

vMF-VAE: A variational autoencoder model using LSTM for both encoder and decoder where the prior distribution is the von Mises-Fisher (vMF) distribution rather than a Gaussian distribution BIBREF5. 
 Question: Do they compare against state of the art text generation?
Yes

 As BIBREF0 discussed, the text-only UMT is fundamentally an ill-posed problem, since there are potentially many ways to associate target with source sentences. Intuitively, since the visual content and language are closely related, the image can play the role of a pivot “language" to bridge the two languages without paralleled corpus, making the problem “more well-defined" by reducing the problem to supervised learning. 
 Question: Why is this work different from text-only UNMT?
the image can play the role of a pivot “language" to bridge the two languages without paralleled corpus

We operationalized the question by submitting the chosen test data to the same vendor-based transcription pipeline that is used at Microsoft for production data (for model training and internal evaluation purposes), and then comparing the results to ASR system output under the NIST scoring protocol.  
 Question: what standard speech transcription pipeline was used?

pipeline that is used at Microsoft for production data

