Towards Coherent and Cohesive Long-form Text Generation

Woon Sang Cho, Pengchuan Zhang, Yizhe Zhang, Xiujun Li, Michel Galley, Chris Brockett, Mengdi Wang, Jianfeng Gao


Abstract
Generating coherent and cohesive long-form texts is a challenging task. Previous works relied on large amounts of human-generated texts to train neural language models. However, few attempted to explicitly improve neural language models from the perspectives of coherence and cohesion. In this work, we propose a new neural language model that is equipped with two neural discriminators which provide feedback signals at the levels of sentence (cohesion) and paragraph (coherence). Our model is trained using a simple yet efficient variant of policy gradient, called ‘negative-critical sequence training’, which is proposed to eliminate the need of training a separate critic for estimating ‘baseline’. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, showing improvements over the strong baseline – recurrent attention-based bidirectional MLE-trained neural language model.
Anthology ID:
W19-2401
Volume:
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Narrative Understanding
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
David Bamman, Snigdha Chaturvedi, Elizabeth Clark, Madalina Fiterau, Mohit Iyyer
Venue:
WNU
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1–11
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-2401
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W19-2401
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Woon Sang Cho, Pengchuan Zhang, Yizhe Zhang, Xiujun Li, Michel Galley, Chris Brockett, Mengdi Wang, and Jianfeng Gao. 2019. Towards Coherent and Cohesive Long-form Text Generation. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Narrative Understanding, pages 1–11, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Towards Coherent and Cohesive Long-form Text Generation (Cho et al., WNU 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-3/W19-2401.pdf
Supplementary:
 W19-2401.Supplementary.pdf