Most Language Models can be Poets too: An AI Writing Assistant and Constrained Text Generation Studio

TL;DR

This paper introduces a universal, plug-and-play technique for constraining language model outputs, demonstrated through an AI writing assistant that handles various lexical, semantic, and phonetic constraints without modifying the models.

Contribution

The authors propose a simple, model-agnostic method for applying constraints to language model outputs and develop an accessible AI writing tool called CTGS that supports diverse constraints.

Findings

Language models generate compelling text under constraints.

The method outperforms fine-tuning on a letter-omission dataset.

The approach is versatile and easy to implement.

Abstract

Despite rapid advancement in the field of Constrained Natural Language Generation, little time has been spent on exploring the potential of language models which have had their vocabularies lexically, semantically, and/or phonetically constrained. We find that most language models generate compelling text even under significant constraints. We present a simple and universally applicable technique for modifying the output of a language model by compositionally applying filter functions to the language models vocabulary before a unit of text is generated. This approach is plug-and-play and requires no modification to the model. To showcase the value of this technique, we present an easy to use AI writing assistant called Constrained Text Generation Studio (CTGS). CTGS allows users to generate or choose from text with any combination of a wide variety of constraints, such as banning a particular letter, forcing the generated words to have a certain number of syllables, and/or forcing the words to be partial anagrams of another word. We introduce a novel dataset of prose that omits the letter e. We show that our method results in strictly superior performance compared to fine-tuning alone on this dataset. We also present a Huggingface space web-app presenting this technique called Gadsby. The code is available to the public here: https://github.com/Hellisotherpeople/Constrained-Text-Generation-Studio