Parallel Iterative Edit Models for Local Sequence Transduction

Abhijeet Awasthi, Sunita Sarawagi, Rasna Goyal, Sabyasachi Ghosh, Vihari Piratla


Abstract
We present a Parallel Iterative Edit (PIE) model for the problem of local sequence transduction arising in tasks like Grammatical error correction (GEC). Recent approaches are based on the popular encoder-decoder (ED) model for sequence to sequence learning. The ED model auto-regressively captures full dependency among output tokens but is slow due to sequential decoding. The PIE model does parallel decoding, giving up the advantage of modeling full dependency in the output, yet it achieves accuracy competitive with the ED model for four reasons: 1. predicting edits instead of tokens, 2. labeling sequences instead of generating sequences, 3. iteratively refining predictions to capture dependencies, and 4. factorizing logits over edits and their token argument to harness pre-trained language models like BERT. Experiments on tasks spanning GEC, OCR correction and spell correction demonstrate that the PIE model is an accurate and significantly faster alternative for local sequence transduction.
Anthology ID:
D19-1435
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:
4260–4270
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1435
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1435
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Abhijeet Awasthi, Sunita Sarawagi, Rasna Goyal, Sabyasachi Ghosh, and Vihari Piratla. 2019. Parallel Iterative Edit Models for Local Sequence Transduction. 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 4260–4270, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Parallel Iterative Edit Models for Local Sequence Transduction (Awasthi et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1435.pdf
Attachment:
 D19-1435.Attachment.pdf
Data
CoNLLCoNLL-2014 Shared Task: Grammatical Error CorrectionJFLEG