Explicit Syntactic Guidance for Neural Text Generation

Yafu Li, Leyang Cui, Jianhao Yan, Yongjing Yin, Wei Bi, Shuming Shi, Yue Zhang


Abstract
Most existing text generation models follow the sequence-to-sequence paradigm. Generative Grammar suggests that humans generate natural language texts by learning language grammar. We propose a syntax-guided generation schema, which generates the sequence guided by a constituency parse tree in a top-down direction. The decoding process can be decomposed into two parts: (1) predicting the infilling texts for each constituent in the lexicalized syntax context given the source sentence; (2) mapping and expanding each constituent to construct the next-level syntax context. Accordingly, we propose a structural beam search method to find possible syntax structures hierarchically. Experiments on paraphrase generation and machine translation show that the proposed method outperforms autoregressive baselines, while also demonstrating effectiveness in terms of interpretability, controllability, and diversity.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.788
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
14095–14112
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.788
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.788
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yafu Li, Leyang Cui, Jianhao Yan, Yongjing Yin, Wei Bi, Shuming Shi, and Yue Zhang. 2023. Explicit Syntactic Guidance for Neural Text Generation. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 14095–14112, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Explicit Syntactic Guidance for Neural Text Generation (Li et al., ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.788.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.788.mp4