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Non-Autoregressive Text Generation with Pre-trained Language Models

Published version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Conference Object

Change log

Authors

Cai, Deng 
Wang, Yan 
Vandyke, David 

Abstract

Non-autoregressive generation (NAG) has recently attracted great attention due to its fast inference speed. However, the generation quality of existing NAG models still lags behind their autoregressive counterparts. In this work, we show that BERT can be employed as the backbone of a NAG model for a greatly improved performance. Additionally, we devise two mechanisms to alleviate the two common problems of vanilla NAG models: the inflexibility of prefixed output length and the conditional independence of individual token predictions. To further strengthen the speed advantage of the proposed model, we propose a new decoding strategy, ratio-first, for applications where the output lengths can be approximately estimated beforehand. For a comprehensive evaluation, we test the proposed model on three text generation tasks, including text summarization, sentence compression and machine translation. Experimental results show that our model significantly outperforms existing non-autoregressive baselines and achieves competitive performance with many strong autoregressive models. In addition, we also conduct extensive analysis experiments to reveal the effect of each proposed component.

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Keywords

Journal Title

Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Conference Name

EACL

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

Association for Computational Linguistics