Non-Monotonic Sequential Text Generation
This addresses the limitation of pre-specified generation orders in text generation, offering a novel approach for natural language processing tasks.
The paper tackles the problem of text generation by proposing a framework that learns non-monotonic generation orders without additional annotation, achieving competitive performance with conventional left-to-right methods.
Standard sequential generation methods assume a pre-specified generation order, such as text generation methods which generate words from left to right. In this work, we propose a framework for training models of text generation that operate in non-monotonic orders; the model directly learns good orders, without any additional annotation. Our framework operates by generating a word at an arbitrary position, and then recursively generating words to its left and then words to its right, yielding a binary tree. Learning is framed as imitation learning, including a coaching method which moves from imitating an oracle to reinforcing the policy's own preferences. Experimental results demonstrate that using the proposed method, it is possible to learn policies which generate text without pre-specifying a generation order, while achieving competitive performance with conventional left-to-right generation.