Style Control for Schema-Guided Natural Language Generation

Alicia Tsai, Shereen Oraby, Vittorio Perera, Jiun-Yu Kao, Yuheng Du, Anjali Narayan-Chen, Tagyoung Chung, Dilek Hakkani-Tur


Abstract
Natural Language Generation (NLG) for task-oriented dialogue systems focuses on communicating specific content accurately, fluently, and coherently. While these attributes are crucial for a successful dialogue, it is also desirable to simultaneously accomplish specific stylistic goals, such as response length, point-of-view, descriptiveness, sentiment, formality, and empathy. In this work, we focus on stylistic control and evaluation for schema-guided NLG, with joint goals of achieving both semantic and stylistic control. We experiment in detail with various controlled generation methods for large pretrained language models: specifically, conditional training, guided fine-tuning, and guided decoding. We discuss their advantages and limitations, and evaluate them with a broad range of automatic and human evaluation metrics. Our results show that while high style accuracy and semantic correctness are easier to achieve for more lexically-defined styles with conditional training, stylistic control is also achievable for more semantically complex styles using discriminator-based guided decoding methods. The results also suggest that methods that are more scalable (with less hyper-parameters tuning) and that disentangle context generation and stylistic variations are more effective at achieving semantic correctness and style accuracy.
Anthology ID:
2021.nlp4convai-1.21
Volume:
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Conversational AI
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Alexandros Papangelis, Paweł Budzianowski, Bing Liu, Elnaz Nouri, Abhinav Rastogi, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
NLP4ConvAI
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
228–242
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.nlp4convai-1.21
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.nlp4convai-1.21
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Alicia Tsai, Shereen Oraby, Vittorio Perera, Jiun-Yu Kao, Yuheng Du, Anjali Narayan-Chen, Tagyoung Chung, and Dilek Hakkani-Tur. 2021. Style Control for Schema-Guided Natural Language Generation. In Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Conversational AI, pages 228–242, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Style Control for Schema-Guided Natural Language Generation (Tsai et al., NLP4ConvAI 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.nlp4convai-1.21.pdf
Data
SGD