A Quality-based Syntactic Template Retriever for Syntactically-Controlled Paraphrase Generation
Xue Zhang, Songming Zhang, Yunlong Liang, Yufeng Chen, Jian Liu, Wenjuan Han, Jinan Xu
Abstract
Existing syntactically-controlled paraphrase generation (SPG) models perform promisingly with human-annotated or well-chosen syntactic templates. However, the difficulty of obtaining such templates actually hinders the practical application of SPG models. For one thing, the prohibitive cost makes it unfeasible to manually design decent templates for every source sentence. For another, the templates automatically retrieved by current heuristic methods are usually unreliable for SPG models to generate qualified paraphrases. To escape this dilemma, we propose a novel Quality-based Syntactic Template Retriever (QSTR) to retrieve templates based on the quality of the to-be-generated paraphrases. Furthermore, for situations requiring multiple paraphrases for each source sentence, we design a Diverse Templates Search (DTS) algorithm, which can enhance the diversity between paraphrases without sacrificing quality. Experiments demonstrate that QSTR can significantly surpass existing retrieval methods in generating high-quality paraphrases and even perform comparably with human-annotated templates in terms of reference-free metrics. Additionally, human evaluation and the performance on downstream tasks using our generated paraphrases for data augmentation showcase the potential of our QSTR and DTS algorithm in practical scenarios.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.emnlp-main.604
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
- Month:
- December
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Singapore
- Editors:
- Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
- Venue:
- EMNLP
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 9736–9748
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.604
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.604
- Cite (ACL):
- Xue Zhang, Songming Zhang, Yunlong Liang, Yufeng Chen, Jian Liu, Wenjuan Han, and Jinan Xu. 2023. A Quality-based Syntactic Template Retriever for Syntactically-Controlled Paraphrase Generation. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 9736–9748, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- A Quality-based Syntactic Template Retriever for Syntactically-Controlled Paraphrase Generation (Zhang et al., EMNLP 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-2/2023.emnlp-main.604.pdf