Papers › Encode, Tag, Realize: High-Precision Text Editing

Encode, Tag, Realize: High-Precision Text Editing

3 Sep 2019IJCNLP 2019 11arXiv:1909.01187archive 2025-07-28

Eric Malmi, Sebastian Krause, Sascha Rothe, Daniil Mirylenka, Aliaksei Severyn

We propose LaserTagger - a sequence tagging approach that casts text generation as a text editing task. Target texts are reconstructed from the inputs using three main edit operations: keeping a token, deleting it, and adding a phrase before the token. To predict the edit operations, we propose a novel model, which combines a BERT encoder with an autoregressive Transformer decoder. This approach is evaluated on English text on four tasks: sentence fusion, sentence splitting, abstractive summarization, and grammar correction. LaserTagger achieves new state-of-the-art results on three of these tasks, performs comparably to a set of strong seq2seq baselines with a large number of training examples, and outperforms them when the number of examples is limited. Furthermore, we show that at inference time tagging can be more than two orders of magnitude faster than comparable seq2seq models, making it more attractive for running in a live environment.

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Code

Syntology Ran 2 of 11 code samples harvested from 3 repositories linked to this paper; 9 have no recorded run. Of those that ran: 1 ran · honoured contract; 1 ran · our draft was wrong.

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google-research/lasertagger officialmentioned on GitHubtfApache-2.0 report
Mleader2/text_scalpel mentioned on GitHubtfApache-2.0 report
a414351664/my_git_laser mentioned on GitHubtfApache-2.0 report
googlx/lasertagger mentioned on GitHubtfApache-2.0 report
leshanbog/lasertagger mentioned on GitHubtfApache-2.0 report

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11 samples harvested; 2 ran; 1 honoured the contract we drafted; 9 have no recorded run. Read from Syntology's graph 2026-09-24; that is when this build read the record, not when the samples ran.

1ran · honoured contract
1ran · our draft was wrong
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compute_exact_score google-research/lasertagger/score_lib.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · ad99b5c7198b14ae · report
file_based_input_fn_builder google-research/lasertagger/run_lasertagger.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 7b42fac7fabad0d0 · report
get_decoder_self_attention_bias google-research/lasertagger/official_transformer/model_utils.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 4ac66a5bb7ec9424 · report
get_padding google-research/lasertagger/official_transformer/model_utils.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 759afd2d7986d5ef · report
get_position_encoding google-research/lasertagger/official_transformer/model_utils.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 962597922993960f · report
read_data google-research/lasertagger/score_lib.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 96df8acf9bbef810 · report
gelu a414351664/my_git_laser/bert/modeling.py community (archive-listed) ran · honoured contract fingerprinted Apache-2.0 (permissive) · d08f324f950148de · report
get_activation a414351664/my_git_laser/bert/modeling.py community (archive-listed) ran · our draft was wrong Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 5842ee67106321d6 · report
compute_exact_score Mleader2/text_scalpel/score_lib.py community (archive-listed) unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 871aa091696585b2 · report
get_assignment_map_from_checkpoint a414351664/my_git_laser/bert/modeling.py community (archive-listed) unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 50958618b65e514e · report
read_data Mleader2/text_scalpel/score_lib.py community (archive-listed) unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · b2930bd544830411 · report

Tasks

Abstractive Text SummarizationDecoderSentenceSentence FusionSplit and RephraseTAGText GenerationVocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

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Methods

Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionAttention DropoutBERTBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutLSTMLabel SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Linear DecayMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerReLUResidual ConnectionSeq2SeqSigmoid ActivationSoftmaxTanh ActivationTransformerWeight DecayWordPiece

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