Neural Syntactic Preordering for Controlled Paraphrase Generation

Tanya Goyal, Greg Durrett


Abstract
Paraphrasing natural language sentences is a multifaceted process: it might involve replacing individual words or short phrases, local rearrangement of content, or high-level restructuring like topicalization or passivization. Past approaches struggle to cover this space of paraphrase possibilities in an interpretable manner. Our work, inspired by pre-ordering literature in machine translation, uses syntactic transformations to softly “reorder” the source sentence and guide our neural paraphrasing model. First, given an input sentence, we derive a set of feasible syntactic rearrangements using an encoder-decoder model. This model operates over a partially lexical, partially syntactic view of the sentence and can reorder big chunks. Next, we use each proposed rearrangement to produce a sequence of position embeddings, which encourages our final encoder-decoder paraphrase model to attend to the source words in a particular order. Our evaluation, both automatic and human, shows that the proposed system retains the quality of the baseline approaches while giving a substantial increase in the diversity of the generated paraphrases.
Anthology ID:
2020.acl-main.22
Volume:
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Dan Jurafsky, Joyce Chai, Natalie Schluter, Joel Tetreault
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
238–252
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.22
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.22
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tanya Goyal and Greg Durrett. 2020. Neural Syntactic Preordering for Controlled Paraphrase Generation. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 238–252, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Neural Syntactic Preordering for Controlled Paraphrase Generation (Goyal & Durrett, ACL 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.22.pdf
Video:
 http://slideslive.com/38928794
Code
 tagoyal/sow-reap-paraphrasing +  additional community code
Data
11k Hands