Yao Ming


2022

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Sequentially Controlled Text Generation
Alexander Spangher | Yao Ming | Xinyu Hua | Nanyun Peng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

While GPT-2 generates sentences that are remarkably human-like, longer documents can ramble and do not follow human-like writing structure. We study the problem of imposing structure on long-range text. We propose a novel controlled text generation task, sequentially controlled text generation, and identify a dataset, NewsDiscourse as a starting point for this task. We develop a sequential controlled text generation pipeline with generation and editing. We test different degrees of structural awareness and show that, in general, more structural awareness results in higher control- accuracy, grammaticality, coherency and topicality, approaching human-level writing performance.