Rethinking Self-Supervision Objectives for Generalizable Coherence Modeling

Prathyusha Jwalapuram, Shafiq Joty, Xiang Lin


Abstract
Given the claims of improved text generation quality across various pre-trained neural models, we consider the coherence evaluation of machine generated text to be one of the principal applications of coherence models that needs to be investigated. Prior work in neural coherence modeling has primarily focused on devising new architectures for solving the permuted document task. We instead use a basic model architecture and show significant improvements over state of the art within the same training regime. We then design a harder self-supervision objective by increasing the ratio of negative samples within a contrastive learning setup, and enhance the model further through automatic hard negative mining coupled with a large global negative queue encoded by a momentum encoder. We show empirically that increasing the density of negative samples improves the basic model, and using a global negative queue further improves and stabilizes the model while training with hard negative samples. We evaluate the coherence model on task-independent test sets that resemble real-world applications and show significant improvements in coherence evaluations of downstream tasks.
Anthology ID:
2022.acl-long.418
Volume:
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
May
Year:
2022
Address:
Dublin, Ireland
Editors:
Smaranda Muresan, Preslav Nakov, Aline Villavicencio
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6044–6059
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.418
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.418
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Prathyusha Jwalapuram, Shafiq Joty, and Xiang Lin. 2022. Rethinking Self-Supervision Objectives for Generalizable Coherence Modeling. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 6044–6059, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Rethinking Self-Supervision Objectives for Generalizable Coherence Modeling (Jwalapuram et al., ACL 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.418.pdf
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