Don’t Take It Literally: An Edit-Invariant Sequence Loss for Text Generation

Guangyi Liu, Zichao Yang, Tianhua Tao, Xiaodan Liang, Junwei Bao, Zhen Li, Xiaodong He, Shuguang Cui, Zhiting Hu


Abstract
Neural text generation models are typically trained by maximizing log-likelihood with the sequence cross entropy (CE) loss, which encourages an exact token-by-token match between a target sequence with a generated sequence. Such training objective is sub-optimal when the target sequence is not perfect, e.g., when the target sequence is corrupted with noises, or when only weak sequence supervision is available. To address the challenge, we propose a novel Edit-Invariant Sequence Loss (EISL), which computes the matching loss of a target n-gram with all n-grams in the generated sequence. EISL is designed to be robust to various noises and edits in the target sequences. Moreover, the EISL computation is essentially an approximate convolution operation with target n-grams as kernels, which is easy to implement and efficient to compute with existing libraries. To demonstrate the effectiveness of EISL, we conduct experiments on a wide range of tasks, including machine translation with noisy target sequences, unsupervised text style transfer with only weak training signals, and non-autoregressive generation with non-predefined generation order. Experimental results show our method significantly outperforms the common CE loss and other strong baselines on all the tasks. EISL has a simple API that can be used as a drop-in replacement of the CE loss: https://github.com/guangyliu/EISL.
Anthology ID:
2022.naacl-main.150
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Month:
July
Year:
2022
Address:
Seattle, United States
Editors:
Marine Carpuat, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Ivan Vladimir Meza Ruiz
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2055–2078
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-main.150
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.naacl-main.150
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Guangyi Liu, Zichao Yang, Tianhua Tao, Xiaodan Liang, Junwei Bao, Zhen Li, Xiaodong He, Shuguang Cui, and Zhiting Hu. 2022. Don’t Take It Literally: An Edit-Invariant Sequence Loss for Text Generation. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 2055–2078, Seattle, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Don’t Take It Literally: An Edit-Invariant Sequence Loss for Text Generation (Liu et al., NAACL 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-main.150.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-main.150.mp4
Code
 guangyliu/EISL