A Well-Composed Text is Half Done! Composition Sampling for Diverse Conditional Generation

Yao Zhao
Mirella Lapata
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2022), Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 21

Abstract

We propose Composition Sampling, a simple but effective method to generate diverse outputs for conditional generation of higher quality compared to previous stochastic decoding strategies. It builds on recently proposed plan-based neural generation models (Narayan et al., 2021) that are trained to first create a composition of the output and then generate by conditioning on it and the input. Our approach
avoids text degeneration by first sampling a composition in the form of an entity chain and then using beam search to generate the best possible text grounded to this entity chain. Experiments on summarization (CNN/DailyMail and XSum) and question generation (SQuAD), using existing and newly proposed automatic metrics together with human-based evaluation, demonstrate that Composition Sampling is currently the best available decoding strategy for generating diverse meaningful outputs.