Text Editing by Command

Felix Faltings, Michel Galley, Gerold Hintz, Chris Brockett, Chris Quirk, Jianfeng Gao, Bill Dolan


Abstract
A prevailing paradigm in neural text generation is one-shot generation, where text is produced in a single step. The one-shot setting is inadequate, however, when the constraints the user wishes to impose on the generated text are dynamic, especially when authoring longer documents. We address this limitation with an interactive text generation setting in which the user interacts with the system by issuing commands to edit existing text. To this end, we propose a novel text editing task, and introduce WikiDocEdits, a dataset of single-sentence edits crawled from Wikipedia. We show that our Interactive Editor, a transformer-based model trained on this dataset, outperforms baselines and obtains positive results in both automatic and human evaluations. We present empirical and qualitative analyses of this model’s performance.
Anthology ID:
2021.naacl-main.414
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Month:
June
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Kristina Toutanova, Anna Rumshisky, Luke Zettlemoyer, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Iz Beltagy, Steven Bethard, Ryan Cotterell, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Yichao Zhou
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5259–5274
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.414
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.414
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Felix Faltings, Michel Galley, Gerold Hintz, Chris Brockett, Chris Quirk, Jianfeng Gao, and Bill Dolan. 2021. Text Editing by Command. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 5259–5274, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Text Editing by Command (Faltings et al., NAACL 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.414.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.414.mp4
Data
WikiDocEditsWikiAtomicEdits