Papers › Language Generation via Combinatorial Constraint Satisfaction: A Tree Search Enhanced...

Language Generation via Combinatorial Constraint Satisfaction: A Tree Search Enhanced Monte-Carlo Approach

24 Nov 2020Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2020arXiv:2011.12334archive 2025-07-28

Maosen Zhang, Nan Jiang, Lei LI, Yexiang Xue

Generating natural language under complex constraints is a principled formulation towards controllable text generation. We present a framework to allow specification of combinatorial constraints for sentence generation. We propose TSMH, an efficient method to generate high likelihood sentences with respect to a pre-trained language model while satisfying the constraints. Our approach is highly flexible, requires no task-specific training, and leverages efficient constraint satisfaction solving techniques. To better handle the combinatorial constraints, a tree search algorithm is embedded into the proposal process of the Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) to explore candidates that satisfy more constraints. Compared to existing MCMC approaches, our sampling approach has a better mixing performance. Experiments show that TSMH achieves consistent and significant improvement on multiple language generation tasks.

PaperPDFConference PDFCode

Code

Milozms/TSMH officialmentioned in paperpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Language ModelingLanguage ModellingSentenceText Generation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections