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Natural Language Generation by Hierarchical Decoding with Linguistic Patterns

This paper is published in Proceedings of The 16th Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT 2018).

Full paper: Here, arXiv

Code: GitHub

Cite the paper:

@inproceedings{su2018natural,
  title={Natural Language Generation by Hierarchical Decoding with Linguistic Patterns},
    author={Shang-Yu Su, Kai-Ling Lo, Yi-Ting Yeh, and Yun-Nung Chen},
    booktitle={Proceedings of The 16th Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies},
    year={2018}
}

Natural language generation (NLG) is a critical component in spoken dialogue systems. Classic NLG can be divided into two phases:

  • sentence planning: deciding on the overall sentence structure,
  • surface realization: determining specific word forms and flattening the sentence structure into a string.

Many simple NLG models are based on recurrent neural networks (RNN) and sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) model, which basically contains a encoder-decoder structure; these NLG models generate sentences from scratch by jointly optimizing sentence planning and surface realization using a simple cross entropy loss training criterion.

However, the simple encoder-decoder architecture usually suffers from generating complex and long sentences, because the decoder has to learn all grammar and diction knowledge.

This paper introduces a hierarchical decoding NLG model based on linguistic patterns in different levels, and shows that the proposed method outperforms the traditional one with a smaller model size. Furthermore, the design of the hierarchical decoding is flexible and easily-extendible in various NLG systems (The source code is available at https://github.com/MiuLab/HNLG).


Researcher of Natural Language Processing.
Shang-Yu Su