Harvesting Creative Templates for Generating Stylistically Varied Restaurant Reviews

Shereen Oraby, Sheideh Homayon, Marilyn Walker


Abstract
Many of the creative and figurative elements that make language exciting are lost in translation in current natural language generation engines. In this paper, we explore a method to harvest templates from positive and negative reviews in the restaurant domain, with the goal of vastly expanding the types of stylistic variation available to the natural language generator. We learn hyperbolic adjective patterns that are representative of the strongly-valenced expressive language commonly used in either positive or negative reviews. We then identify and delexicalize entities, and use heuristics to extract generation templates from review sentences. We evaluate the learned templates against more traditional review templates, using subjective measures of convincingness, interestingness, and naturalness. Our results show that the learned templates score highly on these measures. Finally, we analyze the linguistic categories that characterize the learned positive and negative templates. We plan to use the learned templates to improve the conversational style of dialogue systems in the restaurant domain.
Anthology ID:
W17-4904
Volume:
Proceedings of the Workshop on Stylistic Variation
Month:
September
Year:
2017
Address:
Copenhagen, Denmark
Editors:
Julian Brooke, Thamar Solorio, Moshe Koppel
Venue:
Style-Var
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
28–36
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-4904
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W17-4904
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shereen Oraby, Sheideh Homayon, and Marilyn Walker. 2017. Harvesting Creative Templates for Generating Stylistically Varied Restaurant Reviews. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Stylistic Variation, pages 28–36, Copenhagen, Denmark. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Harvesting Creative Templates for Generating Stylistically Varied Restaurant Reviews (Oraby et al., Style-Var 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-4904.pdf