No Arabic abstract
Large-scale language models show promising text generation capabilities, but users cannot easily control particular aspects of the generated text. We release CTRL, a 1.63 billion-parameter conditional transformer language model, trained to condition on control codes that govern style, content, and task-specific behavior. Control codes were derived from structure that naturally co-occurs with raw text, preserving the advantages of unsupervised learning while providing more explicit control over text generation. These codes also allow CTRL to predict which parts of the training data are most likely given a sequence. This provides a potential method for analyzing large amounts of data via model-based source attribution. We have released multiple full-sized, pretrain
We investigate large-scale latent variable models (LVMs) for neural story generation -- an under-explored application for open-domain long text -- with objectives in two threads: generation effectiveness and controllability. LVMs, especially the variational autoencoder (VAE), have achieved both effective and controllable generation through exploiting flexible distributional latent representations. Recently, Transformers and its variants have achieved remarkable effectiveness without explicit latent representation learning, thus lack satisfying controllability in generation. In this paper, we advocate to revive latent variable modeling, essentially the power of representation learning, in the era of Transformers to enhance controllability without hurting state-of-the-art generation effectiveness. Specifically, we integrate latent representation vectors with a Transformer-based pre-trained architecture to build conditional variational autoencoder (CVAE). Model components such as encoder, decoder and the variational posterior are all built on top of pre-trained language models -- GPT2 specifically in this paper. Experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art conditional generation ability of our model, as well as its excellent representation learning capability and controllability.
Large pretrained language models have changed the way researchers approach discriminative natural language understanding tasks, leading to the dominance of approaches that adapt a pretrained model for arbitrary downstream tasks. However it is an open-question how to use similar techniques for language generation. Early results in the encoder-agnostic setting have been mostly negative. In this work we explore methods for adapting a pretrained language model to arbitrary conditional input. We observe that pretrained transformer models are sensitive to large parameter changes during tuning. We therefore propose an adaptation that directly injects arbitrary conditioning into self attention, an approach we call pseudo self attention. Through experiments on four diverse conditional text generation tasks we show that this encoder-agnostic technique outperforms strong baselines, produces coherent generations, and is data efficient.
The dominant language modeling paradigm handles text as a sequence of discrete tokens. While that approach can capture the latent structure of the text, it is inherently constrained to sequential dynamics for text generation. We propose a new paradigm for introducing a syntactic inductive bias into neural text generation, where the dependency parse tree is used to drive the Transformer model to generate sentences iteratively. Our experiments show that this paradigm is effective at text generation, with quality between LSTMs and Transformers, and comparable diversity, requiring less than half their decoding steps, and its generation process allows direct control over the syntactic constructions of the generated text, enabling the induction of stylistic variations.
Current end-to-end neural conversation models inherently lack the flexibility to impose semantic control in the response generation process, often resulting in uninteresting responses. Attempts to boost informativeness alone come at the expense of factual accuracy, as attested by pretrained language models propensity to hallucinate facts. While this may be mitigated by access to background knowledge, there is scant guarantee of relevance and informativeness in generated responses. We propose a framework that we call controllable grounded response generation (CGRG), in which lexical control phrases are either provided by a user or automatically extracted by a control phrase predictor from dialogue context and grounding knowledge. Quantitative and qualitative results show that, using this framework, a transformer based model with a novel inductive attention mechanism, trained on a conversation-like Reddit dataset, outperforms strong generation baselines.
The Transformer based neural networks have been showing significant advantages on most evaluations of various natural language processing and other sequence-to-sequence tasks due to its inherent architecture based superiorities. Although the main architecture of the Transformer has been continuously being explored, little attention was paid to the positional encoding module. In this paper, we enhance the sinusoidal positional encoding algorithm by maximizing the variances between encoded consecutive positions to obtain additional promotion. Furthermore, we propose an augmented Transformer architecture encoded with additional linguistic knowledge, such as the Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging, to boost the performance on some natural language generation tasks, e.g., the automatic translation and summarization tasks. Experiments show that the proposed architecture attains constantly superior results compared to the vanilla Transformer.