One of the challenges in text generation is to control text generation as intended by the user. Previous studies proposed specifying the keywords that should be included in the generated text. However, this approach is insufficient to generate text that reflect the user’s intent. For example, placing an important keyword at the beginning of the text would help attract the reader’s attention; however, existing methods do not enable such flexible control. In this paper, we tackle a novel task of controlling not only keywords but also the position of each keyword in the text generation. To this end, we propose a task-independent method that uses special tokens to control the relative position of keywords. Experimental results on summarization and story generation tasks show that the proposed method can control keywords and their positions. The experimental results also demonstrate that controlling the keyword positions can generate summary texts that are closer to the user’s intent than baseline.

Question Generation (QG) is the task of generating questions from a given passage. One of the key requirements of QG is to generate a question such that it results in a target answer. Previous works used a target answer to obtain a desired question. However, we also want to specify how to ask questions and improve the quality of generated questions. In this study, we explore the use of interrogative phrases as additional sources to control QG. By providing interrogative phrases, we expect that QG can generate a more reliable sequence of words subsequent to an interrogative phrase. We present a baseline sequence-to-sequence model with the attention, copy, and coverage mechanisms, and show that the simple baseline achieves state-of-the-art performance. The experiments demonstrate that interrogative phrases contribute to improving the performance of QG. In addition, we report the superiority of using interrogative phrases in human evaluation. Finally, we show that a question answering system can provide target answers more correctly when the questions are generated with interrogative phrases.