Assessing Discourse Relations in Language Generation from GPT-2

Wei-Jen Ko, Junyi Jessy Li


Abstract
Recent advances in NLP have been attributed to the emergence of large-scale pre-trained language models. GPT-2, in particular, is suited for generation tasks given its left-to-right language modeling objective, yet the linguistic quality of its generated text has largely remain unexplored. Our work takes a step in understanding GPT-2’s outputs in terms of discourse coherence. We perform a comprehensive study on the validity of explicit discourse relations in GPT-2’s outputs under both organic generation and fine-tuned scenarios. Results show GPT-2 does not always generate text containing valid discourse relations; nevertheless, its text is more aligned with human expectation in the fine-tuned scenario. We propose a decoupled strategy to mitigate these problems and highlight the importance of explicitly modeling discourse information.
Anthology ID:
2020.inlg-1.8
Volume:
Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Natural Language Generation
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Dublin, Ireland
Editors:
Brian Davis, Yvette Graham, John Kelleher, Yaji Sripada
Venue:
INLG
SIG:
SIGGEN
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
52–59
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.inlg-1.8
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.inlg-1.8
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Wei-Jen Ko and Junyi Jessy Li. 2020. Assessing Discourse Relations in Language Generation from GPT-2. In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Natural Language Generation, pages 52–59, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Assessing Discourse Relations in Language Generation from GPT-2 (Ko & Li, INLG 2020)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2020.inlg-1.8.pdf