TempLM: Distilling Language Models into Template-Based Generators

05/23/2022

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by   Tianyi Zhang, et al.

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While pretrained language models (PLMs) have greatly improved text generation, they have also been known to produce unfaithful or inappropriate content. In contrast, classic template-based systems provide strong guarantees of faithfulness at the cost of fluency. We propose TempLM, which achieves the best of both worlds by distilling a PLM into a template-based generator. On the E2E and SynthBio data-to-text datasets, we show that TempLM is more faithful than the original PLM and is more fluent than prior template systems. Notably, on an out-of-domain evaluation, TempLM reduces a finetuned BART model's unfaithfulness rate from 83 templates substantially improve upon human-written ones in BERTScore.