Kexin Yang


2022

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GCPG: A General Framework for Controllable Paraphrase Generation
Kexin Yang | Dayiheng Liu | Wenqiang Lei | Baosong Yang | Haibo Zhang | Xue Zhao | Wenqing Yao | Boxing Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022

Controllable paraphrase generation (CPG) incorporates various external conditions to obtain desirable paraphrases. However, existing works only highlight a special condition under two indispensable aspects of CPG (i.e., lexically and syntactically CPG) individually, lacking a unified circumstance to explore and analyze their effectiveness. In this paper, we propose a general controllable paraphrase generation framework (GCPG), which represents both lexical and syntactical conditions as text sequences and uniformly processes them in an encoder-decoder paradigm. Under GCPG, we reconstruct commonly adopted lexical condition (i.e., Keywords) and syntactical conditions (i.e., Part-Of-Speech sequence, Constituent Tree, Masked Template and Sentential Exemplar) and study the combination of the two types. In particular, for Sentential Exemplar condition, we propose a novel exemplar construction method — Syntax-Similarity based Exemplar (SSE). SSE retrieves a syntactically similar but lexically different sentence as the exemplar for each target sentence, avoiding exemplar-side words copying problem. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GCPG with SSE achieves state-of-the-art performance on two popular benchmarks. In addition, the combination of lexical and syntactical conditions shows the significant controllable ability of paraphrase generation, and these empirical results could provide novel insight to user-oriented paraphrasing.

2021

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POS-Constrained Parallel Decoding for Non-autoregressive Generation
Kexin Yang | Wenqiang Lei | Dayiheng Liu | Weizhen Qi | Jiancheng Lv
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

The multimodality problem has become a major challenge of existing non-autoregressive generation (NAG) systems. A common solution often resorts to sequence-level knowledge distillation by rebuilding the training dataset through autoregressive generation (hereinafter known as “teacher AG”). The success of such methods may largely depend on a latent assumption, i.e., the teacher AG is superior to the NAG model. However, in this work, we experimentally reveal that this assumption does not always hold for the text generation tasks like text summarization and story ending generation. To provide a feasible solution to the multimodality problem of NAG, we propose incorporating linguistic structure (Part-of-Speech sequence in particular) into NAG inference instead of relying on teacher AG. More specifically, the proposed POS-constrained Parallel Decoding (POSPD) method aims at providing a specific POS sequence to constrain the NAG model during decoding. Our experiments demonstrate that POSPD consistently improves NAG models on four text generation tasks to a greater extent compared to knowledge distillation. This observation validates the necessity of exploring the alternatives for sequence-level knowledge distillation.

2019

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Applying Rhetorical Structure Theory to Student Essays for Providing Automated Writing Feedback
Shiyan Jiang | Kexin Yang | Chandrakumari Suvarna | Pooja Casula | Mingtong Zhang | Carolyn Rosé
Proceedings of the Workshop on Discourse Relation Parsing and Treebanking 2019

We present a package of annotation resources, including annotation guideline, flowchart, and an Intelligent Tutoring System for training human annotators. These resources can be used to apply Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) to essays written by students in K-12 schools. Furthermore, we highlight the great potential of using RST to provide automated feedback for improving writing quality across genres.