Improved Lexically Constrained Decoding for Translation and Monolingual Rewriting

J. Edward Hu, Huda Khayrallah, Ryan Culkin, Patrick Xia, Tongfei Chen, Matt Post, Benjamin Van Durme


Abstract
Lexically-constrained sequence decoding allows for explicit positive or negative phrase-based constraints to be placed on target output strings in generation tasks such as machine translation or monolingual text rewriting. We describe vectorized dynamic beam allocation, which extends work in lexically-constrained decoding to work with batching, leading to a five-fold improvement in throughput when working with positive constraints. Faster decoding enables faster exploration of constraint strategies: we illustrate this via data augmentation experiments with a monolingual rewriter applied to the tasks of natural language inference, question answering and machine translation, showing improvements in all three.
Anthology ID:
N19-1090
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Jill Burstein, Christy Doran, Thamar Solorio
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
839–850
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1090
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N19-1090
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
J. Edward Hu, Huda Khayrallah, Ryan Culkin, Patrick Xia, Tongfei Chen, Matt Post, and Benjamin Van Durme. 2019. Improved Lexically Constrained Decoding for Translation and Monolingual Rewriting. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), pages 839–850, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Improved Lexically Constrained Decoding for Translation and Monolingual Rewriting (Hu et al., NAACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1090.pdf
Supplementary:
 N19-1090.Supplementary.pdf
Code
 awslabs/sockeye
Data
MultiNLI