# Sentence Semantic Regression for Text Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.02984 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02984/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Aug 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Neural Machine Translation of Rare Words with Subword Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.07909/) (2015)
- [The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09751/) (2019)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [Hierarchical Neural Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04833/) (2018)
- [PEGASUS: Pre-training with Extracted Gap-sentences for Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08777/) (2019)
- [Aligning Books and Movies: Towards Story-like Visual Explanations by Watching Movies and Reading Books](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.06724/) (2015)
- [On Faithfulness and Factuality in Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00661/) (2020)
- [DialoGPT: Large-Scale Generative Pre-training for Conversational Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00536/) (2019)
- [DailyDialog: A Manually Labelled Multi-turn Dialogue Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03957/) (2017)
- [Recipes for building an open-domain chatbot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13637/) (2020)
- [Neural Text Generation with Unlikelihood Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04319/) (2019)
- [Towards a Human-like Open-Domain Chatbot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.09977/) (2020)
- [Non-Autoregressive Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.02281/) (2017)
- [A Corpus and Evaluation Framework for Deeper Understanding of Commonsense Stories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01696/) (2016)
- [A Neural Attention Model for Abstractive Sentence Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.00685/) (2015)
- [Image Captioning with Semantic Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.03925/) (2016)
- [A Persona-Based Neural Conversation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06155/) (2016)
- [Survey of the State of the Art in Natural Language Generation: Core tasks, applications and evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.09902/) (2017)
- [Neural Responding Machine for Short-Text Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02364/) (2015)
- [Enabling Language Models to Fill in the Blanks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.05339/) (2020)
- [Show and Tell: Lessons learned from the 2015 MSCOCO Image Captioning Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.06647/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Know When To Stop: A Study of Semantic Drift in Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05411/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recall the classical text generation works, the generation framework can be briefly divided into two phases: idea reasoning and surface realization. The target of idea reasoning is to figure out the main idea which will be presented in the following talking/writing periods. Surface realization aims to arrange the most appropriate sentence to depict and convey the information distilled from the main idea. However, the current popular token-by-token text generation methods ignore this crucial process and suffer from many serious issues, such as idea/topic drift. To tackle the problems and realize this two-phase paradigm, we propose a new framework named Sentence Semantic Regression (SSR) based on sentence-level language modeling. For idea reasoning, two architectures SSR-AR and SSR-NonAR are designed to conduct sentence semantic regression autoregressively (like GPT2/3) and bidirectionally (like BERT). In the phase of surface realization, a mixed-granularity sentence decoder is designed to generate text with better consistency by jointly incorporating the predicted sentence-level main idea as well as the preceding contextual token-level information. We conduct experiments on four tasks of story ending prediction, story ending generation, dialogue generation, and sentence infilling. The results show that SSR can obtain better performance in terms of automatic metrics and human evaluation.