A Distributional Lens for Multi-Aspect Controllable Text Generation

Yuxuan Gu, Xiaocheng Feng, Sicheng Ma, Lingyuan Zhang, Heng Gong, Bing Qin


Abstract
Multi-aspect controllable text generation is a more challenging and practical task than single-aspect control. Existing methods achieve complex multi-aspect control by fusing multiple controllers learned from single-aspect, but suffer from attribute degeneration caused by the mutual interference of these controllers. To address this, we provide observations on attribute fusion from a distributional perspective and propose to directly search for the intersection areas of multiple attribute distributions as their combination for generation. Our method first estimates the attribute space with an autoencoder structure. Afterward, we iteratively approach the intersections by jointly minimizing distances to points representing different attributes. Finally, we map them to attribute-relevant sentences with a prefix-tuning-based decoder. Experiments on the three-aspect control task, including sentiment, topic, and detoxification aspects, reveal that our method outperforms several strong baselines on attribute relevance and text quality and achieves the SOTA. Further analysis also supplies some explanatory support for the effectiveness of our approach.
Anthology ID:
2022.emnlp-main.67
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Editors:
Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1023–1043
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.67
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-main.67
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yuxuan Gu, Xiaocheng Feng, Sicheng Ma, Lingyuan Zhang, Heng Gong, and Bing Qin. 2022. A Distributional Lens for Multi-Aspect Controllable Text Generation. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 1023–1043, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Distributional Lens for Multi-Aspect Controllable Text Generation (Gu et al., EMNLP 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.67.pdf