Non-Autoregressive Text Generation with Pre-trained Language Models
Yixuan Su, Deng Cai, Yan Wang, David Vandyke, Simon Baker, Piji Li, Nigel Collier
Abstract
Non-autoregressive generation (NAG) has recently attracted great attention due to its fast inference speed. However, the generation quality of existing NAG models still lags behind their autoregressive counterparts. In this work, we show that BERT can be employed as the backbone of a NAG model for a greatly improved performance. Additionally, we devise two mechanisms to alleviate the two common problems of vanilla NAG models: the inflexibility of prefixed output length and the conditional independence of individual token predictions. To further strengthen the speed advantage of the proposed model, we propose a new decoding strategy, ratio-first, for applications where the output lengths can be approximately estimated beforehand. For a comprehensive evaluation, we test the proposed model on three text generation tasks, including text summarization, sentence compression and machine translation. Experimental results show that our model significantly outperforms existing non-autoregressive baselines and achieves competitive performance with many strong autoregressive models. In addition, we also conduct extensive analysis experiments to reveal the effect of each proposed component.- Anthology ID:
- 2021.eacl-main.18
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume
- Month:
- April
- Year:
- 2021
- Address:
- Online
- Editors:
- Paola Merlo, Jorg Tiedemann, Reut Tsarfaty
- Venue:
- EACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 234–243
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2021.eacl-main.18
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2021.eacl-main.18
- Cite (ACL):
- Yixuan Su, Deng Cai, Yan Wang, David Vandyke, Simon Baker, Piji Li, and Nigel Collier. 2021. Non-Autoregressive Text Generation with Pre-trained Language Models. In Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume, pages 234–243, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Non-Autoregressive Text Generation with Pre-trained Language Models (Su et al., EACL 2021)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-1/2021.eacl-main.18.pdf
- Code
- yxuansu/NAG-BERT
- Data
- Sentence Compression