Controllable Text Generation Using Semantic Control Grammar

Abstract

Controllable text generation is the primary technique for controlling specific attributes such as topic, keywords and obtaining augmented data. This work proposes a novel controllable text generation framework to improve the controllability of generation models. First, we introduce semantic control grammar, a controllable input format to generate sentences that satisfy the constraints. Second, we adopt a generation and rerank method to obtain semantically reranked controlled sentences. Extensive experiments and analyses are conducted on benchmark, natural language understanding, data-to-text generation, and text classification datasets. Through automatic evaluations, we show that our method leads to improvement over strong baselines. The results show that our model can control sentence and word attributes and semantically generate natural sentences. Furthermore, our techniques improve the generation quality of the model.

Keywords

• Controllable text generation
• semantic control grammar
• natural language generation
• deep learning