POINTER: Constrained Progressive Text Generation via Insertion-based Generative Pre-training

Yizhe Zhang, Guoyin Wang, Chunyuan Li, Zhe Gan, Chris Brockett, Bill Dolan


Abstract
Large-scale pre-trained language models, such as BERT and GPT-2, have achieved excellent performance in language representation learning and free-form text generation. However, these models cannot be directly employed to generate text under specified lexical constraints. To address this challenge, we present POINTER (PrOgressive INsertion-based TransformER), a simple yet novel insertion-based approach for hard-constrained text generation. The proposed method operates by progressively inserting new tokens between existing tokens in a parallel manner. This procedure is recursively applied until a sequence is completed. The resulting coarse-to-fine hierarchy makes the generation process intuitive and interpretable. We pre-train our model with the proposed progressive insertion-based objective on a 12GB Wikipedia dataset, and fine-tune it on downstream hard-constrained generation tasks. Non-autoregressive decoding yields a logarithmic time complexity during inference time. Experimental results on both News and Yelp datasets demonstrate that Pointer achieves state-of-the-art performance on constrained text generation. We released the pre-trained models and the source code to facilitate future research.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.698
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Bonnie Webber, Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8649–8670
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.698
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.698
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yizhe Zhang, Guoyin Wang, Chunyuan Li, Zhe Gan, Chris Brockett, and Bill Dolan. 2020. POINTER: Constrained Progressive Text Generation via Insertion-based Generative Pre-training. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 8649–8670, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
POINTER: Constrained Progressive Text Generation via Insertion-based Generative Pre-training (Zhang et al., EMNLP 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.698.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38938973
Code
 dreasysnail/POINTER