A Well-Composed Text is Half Done! Composition Sampling for Diverse Conditional Generation
Shashi Narayan, Gonçalo Simões, Yao Zhao, Joshua Maynez, Dipanjan Das, Michael Collins, Mirella Lapata
Abstract
We propose Composition Sampling, a simple but effective method to generate diverse outputs for conditional generation of higher quality compared to previous stochastic decoding strategies. It builds on recently proposed plan-based neural generation models (FROST, Narayan et al, 2021) that are trained to first create a composition of the output and then generate by conditioning on it and the input. Our approach avoids text degeneration by first sampling a composition in the form of an entity chain and then using beam search to generate the best possible text grounded to this entity chain. Experiments on summarization (CNN/DailyMail and XSum) and question generation (SQuAD), using existing and newly proposed automaticmetrics together with human-based evaluation, demonstrate that Composition Sampling is currently the best available decoding strategy for generating diverse meaningful outputs.- Anthology ID:
- 2022.acl-long.94
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2022
- Address:
- Dublin, Ireland
- Editors:
- Smaranda Muresan, Preslav Nakov, Aline Villavicencio
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 1319–1339
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.94
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.94
- Cite (ACL):
- Shashi Narayan, Gonçalo Simões, Yao Zhao, Joshua Maynez, Dipanjan Das, Michael Collins, and Mirella Lapata. 2022. A Well-Composed Text is Half Done! Composition Sampling for Diverse Conditional Generation. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1319–1339, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- A Well-Composed Text is Half Done! Composition Sampling for Diverse Conditional Generation (Narayan et al., ACL 2022)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-1/2022.acl-long.94.pdf
- Code
- google-research/language
- Data
- SQuAD