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://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.483
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.483
Bibkey:
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)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.483.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.483.mp4
Data
PoMoWikiLarge