Factorising Meaning and Form for Intent-Preserving Paraphrasing

Tom Hosking, Mirella Lapata


Abstract
We propose a method for generating paraphrases of English questions that retain the original intent but use a different surface form. Our model combines a careful choice of training objective with a principled information bottleneck, to induce a latent encoding space that disentangles meaning and form. We train an encoder-decoder model to reconstruct a question from a paraphrase with the same meaning and an exemplar with the same surface form, leading to separated encoding spaces. We use a Vector-Quantized Variational Autoencoder to represent the surface form as a set of discrete latent variables, allowing us to use a classifier to select a different surface form at test time. Crucially, our method does not require access to an external source of target exemplars. Extensive experiments and a human evaluation show that we are able to generate paraphrases with a better tradeoff between semantic preservation and syntactic novelty compared to previous methods.
Anthology ID:
2021.acl-long.112
Volume:
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Chengqing Zong, Fei Xia, Wenjie Li, Roberto Navigli
Venues:
ACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1405–1418
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.112
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.112
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tom Hosking and Mirella Lapata. 2021. Factorising Meaning and Form for Intent-Preserving Paraphrasing. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1405–1418, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Factorising Meaning and Form for Intent-Preserving Paraphrasing (Hosking & Lapata, ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.112.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.112.mp4
Code
 tomhosking/separator
Data
ParalexQuora Question Pairs