ALTER: Auxiliary Text Rewriting Tool for Natural Language Generation

In this paper, we describe ALTER, an auxiliary text rewriting tool that facilitates the rewriting process for natural language generation tasks, such as paraphrasing, text simplification, fairness-aware text rewriting, and text style transfer. Our tool is characterized by two features, i) recording of word-level revision histories and ii) flexible auxiliary edit support and feedback to annotators. The text rewriting assist and traceable rewriting history are potentially beneficial to the future research of natural language generation.Comment: EMNLP 2019 (Demo

On the interaction of automatic evaluation and task framing in headline style transfer

An ongoing debate in the NLG community concerns the best way to evaluate systems, with human evaluation often being considered the most reliable method, compared to corpus-based metrics. However, tasks involving subtle textual differences, such as style transfer, tend to be hard for humans to perform. In this paper, we propose an evaluation method for this task based on purposely-trained classifiers, showing that it better reflects system differences than traditional metrics such as BLEU and ROUGE