Encode, Tag, Realize: High-Precision Text Editing

Eric Malmi, Sebastian Krause, Sascha Rothe, Daniil Mirylenka, Aliaksei Severyn


Abstract
We propose LaserTagger - a sequence tagging approach that casts text generation as a text editing task. Target texts are reconstructed from the inputs using three main edit operations: keeping a token, deleting it, and adding a phrase before the token. To predict the edit operations, we propose a novel model, which combines a BERT encoder with an autoregressive Transformer decoder. This approach is evaluated on English text on four tasks: sentence fusion, sentence splitting, abstractive summarization, and grammar correction. LaserTagger achieves new state-of-the-art results on three of these tasks, performs comparably to a set of strong seq2seq baselines with a large number of training examples, and outperforms them when the number of examples is limited. Furthermore, we show that at inference time tagging can be more than two orders of magnitude faster than comparable seq2seq models, making it more attractive for running in a live environment.
Anthology ID:
D19-1510
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, Xiaojun Wan
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5054–5065
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1510
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1510
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Eric Malmi, Sebastian Krause, Sascha Rothe, Daniil Mirylenka, and Aliaksei Severyn. 2019. Encode, Tag, Realize: High-Precision Text Editing. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 5054–5065, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Encode, Tag, Realize: High-Precision Text Editing (Malmi et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1510.pdf
Attachment:
 D19-1510.Attachment.zip
Code
 google-research/lasertagger +  additional community code
Data
DiscoFuseWikiSplit