Changing the Mind of Transformers for Topically-Controllable Language Generation
Haw-Shiuan Chang, Jiaming Yuan, Mohit Iyyer, Andrew McCallum
Abstract
Large Transformer-based language models can aid human authors by suggesting plausible continuations of text written so far. However, current interactive writing assistants do not allow authors to guide text generation in desired topical directions. To address this limitation, we design a framework that displays multiple candidate upcoming topics, of which a user can select a subset to guide the generation. Our framework consists of two components: (1) a method that produces a set of candidate topics by predicting the centers of word clusters in the possible continuations, and (2) a text generation model whose output adheres to the chosen topics. The training of both components is self-supervised, using only unlabeled text. Our experiments demonstrate that our topic options are better than those of standard clustering approaches, and our framework often generates fluent sentences related to the chosen topics, as judged by automated metrics and crowdsourced workers.- Anthology ID:
- 2021.eacl-main.223
- 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:
- 2601–2611
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2021.eacl-main.223
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2021.eacl-main.223
- Cite (ACL):
- Haw-Shiuan Chang, Jiaming Yuan, Mohit Iyyer, and Andrew McCallum. 2021. Changing the Mind of Transformers for Topically-Controllable Language Generation. In Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume, pages 2601–2611, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Changing the Mind of Transformers for Topically-Controllable Language Generation (Chang et al., EACL 2021)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-1/2021.eacl-main.223.pdf
- Code
- iesl/interactive_LM