Attending to Future Tokens for Bidirectional Sequence Generation

Carolin Lawrence, Bhushan Kotnis, Mathias Niepert


Abstract
Neural sequence generation is typically performed token-by-token and left-to-right. Whenever a token is generated only previously produced tokens are taken into consideration. In contrast, for problems such as sequence classification, bidirectional attention, which takes both past and future tokens into consideration, has been shown to perform much better. We propose to make the sequence generation process bidirectional by employing special placeholder tokens. Treated as a node in a fully connected graph, a placeholder token can take past and future tokens into consideration when generating the actual output token. We verify the effectiveness of our approach experimentally on two conversational tasks where the proposed bidirectional model outperforms competitive baselines by a large margin.
Anthology ID:
D19-1001
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, Xiaojun Wan
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1–10
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1001
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1001
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Carolin Lawrence, Bhushan Kotnis, and Mathias Niepert. 2019. Attending to Future Tokens for Bidirectional Sequence Generation. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 1–10, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Attending to Future Tokens for Bidirectional Sequence Generation (Lawrence et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1001.pdf
Attachment:
 D19-1001.Attachment.pdf
Code
 carolinlawrence/BiSon