Cited by 11Topic ModelingNatural Language Processing TechniquesSpeech Recognition and Synthesis

On-the-Fly Attention Modulation for Neural Generation

Open access
Dong, Yue, Bhagavatula, Chandra, Lu, Ximing, Hwang, Jena D., Bosselut, Antoine, Cheung, Jackie Chi Kit, Choi, Yejin·2021·Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

Abstract

Despite considerable advancements with deep neural language models (LMs), neural text generation still suffers from degeneration: the generated text is repetitive, generic, selfcontradictory, and often lacks commonsense.Our analyses on sentence-level attention patterns in LMs reveal that neural degeneration may be associated with insufficient learning of task-specific characteristics by the attention mechanism.This finding motivates onthe-fly attention modulation 1 -a simple but effective method that enables the injection of priors into attention computation during inference.Automatic and human evaluation results on three text generation benchmarks demonstrate that attention modulation helps LMs generate text with enhanced fluency, creativity, and commonsense reasoning, in addition to significantly reduce sentence-level repetition.

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Crossref · 10.18653/v1/2021.findings-acl.107

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  1. Paul Michel, Omer Levy, and Graham Neubig. 2019. Are sixteen heads really better than one? In Ad- vances in Neural Information Processing Systems, volume 32, pages 14014-14024.

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Authors
Dong, Y., Bhagavatula, C., Lu, X., Hwang, J. D., Bosselut, A., Cheung, J. C. K., & Choi, Y.
Affiliations
  • McGill University (CA)
  • Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (US)
  • University of Washington (US)
Venue
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021
Published
2021
Pages
1261-1274
OpenAlex
W3174704627
Cited by
10
References
32
Citations by year
2026: 1 · 2025: 3 · 2023: 3 · 2022: 3
FWCI
0.69
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Licence
cc-by
Locations
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL (Findings of ACL) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
Funders
  • National Science Foundation (1714566)
  • Canadian Institute for Advanced Research
  • Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence
  • Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (N66001-19-2-4031, N66001-19)
  • Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
  • Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Topic Modeling
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Natural Language Processing Techniques
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Speech Recognition and Synthesis
Keywords
attentional modulation, neural text generation, commonsense reasoning, repetition reduction, text fluency

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