Sentence-Level Content Planning and Style Specification for Neural Text Generation

Xinyu Hua, Lu Wang


Abstract
Building effective text generation systems requires three critical components: content selection, text planning, and surface realization, and traditionally they are tackled as separate problems. Recent all-in-one style neural generation models have made impressive progress, yet they often produce outputs that are incoherent and unfaithful to the input. To address these issues, we present an end-to-end trained two-step generation model, where a sentence-level content planner first decides on the keyphrases to cover as well as a desired language style, followed by a surface realization decoder that generates relevant and coherent text. For experiments, we consider three tasks from domains with diverse topics and varying language styles: persuasive argument construction from Reddit, paragraph generation for normal and simple versions of Wikipedia, and abstract generation for scientific articles. Automatic evaluation shows that our system can significantly outperform competitive comparisons. Human judges further rate our system generated text as more fluent and correct, compared to the generations by its variants that do not consider language style.
Anthology ID:
D19-1055
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:
591–602
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1055
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1055
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xinyu Hua and Lu Wang. 2019. Sentence-Level Content Planning and Style Specification for Neural Text 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 591–602, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Sentence-Level Content Planning and Style Specification for Neural Text Generation (Hua & Wang, EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1055.pdf
Attachment:
 D19-1055.Attachment.pdf
Data
AGENDA