IGA: An Intent-Guided Authoring Assistant
Simeng Sun, Wenlong Zhao, Varun Manjunatha, Rajiv Jain, Vlad Morariu, Franck Dernoncourt, Balaji Vasan Srinivasan, Mohit Iyyer
Abstract
While large-scale pretrained language models have significantly improved writing assistance functionalities such as autocomplete, more complex and controllable writing assistants have yet to be explored. We leverage advances in language modeling to build an interactive writing assistant that generates and rephrases text according to fine-grained author specifications. Users provide input to our Intent-Guided Assistant (IGA) in the form of text interspersed with tags that correspond to specific rhetorical directives (e.g., adding description or contrast, or rephrasing a particular sentence). We fine-tune a language model on a dataset heuristically-labeled with author intent, which allows IGA to fill in these tags with generated text that users can subsequently edit to their liking. A series of automatic and crowdsourced evaluations confirm the quality of IGA’s generated outputs, while a small-scale user study demonstrates author preference for IGA over baseline methods in a creative writing task. We release our dataset, code, and demo to spur further research into AI-assisted writing.- Anthology ID:
- 2021.emnlp-main.483
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
- Month:
- November
- Year:
- 2021
- Address:
- Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
- Editors:
- Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
- Venue:
- EMNLP
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 5972–5985
- Language:
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/remove-affiliations/2021.emnlp-main.483/
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.483
- Cite (ACL):
- Simeng Sun, Wenlong Zhao, Varun Manjunatha, Rajiv Jain, Vlad Morariu, Franck Dernoncourt, Balaji Vasan Srinivasan, and Mohit Iyyer. 2021. IGA: An Intent-Guided Authoring Assistant. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 5972–5985, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- IGA: An Intent-Guided Authoring Assistant (Sun et al., EMNLP 2021)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/remove-affiliations/2021.emnlp-main.483.pdf
- Data
- PoMo, WikiLarge