GTA: Gated Toxicity Avoidance for LM Performance Preservation

Published: 07 Oct 2023, Last Modified: 01 Dec 2023EMNLP 2023 FindingsEveryoneRevisionsBibTeX
Submission Type: Regular Long Paper
Submission Track: Natural Language Generation
Submission Track 2: Efficient Methods for NLP
Keywords: language model, controllable text generation, toxicity avoidance, nontoxic text generation, text generation, natural language generation
TL;DR: The controllable text generation method reduce toxicity and degrade performance of the language model. We proposed the gated toxicity avoidance to resolve this problems. It reduces toxicity and preserves LM performance.
Abstract: Caution: This paper includes offensive words that could potentially cause unpleasantness. The fast-paced evolution of generative language models such as GPT-4 has demonstrated outstanding results in various NLP generation tasks. However, due to the potential generation of offensive words related to race or gender, various Controllable Text Generation (CTG) methods have been proposed to mitigate the occurrence of harmful words. However, existing CTG methods not only reduce toxicity but also negatively impact several aspects of the language model's generation performance, including topic consistency, grammar, and perplexity. This paper explores the limitations of previous methods and introduces a novel solution in the form of a simple Gated Toxicity Avoidance (GTA) that can be applied to any CTG method. We also evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed GTA by comparing it with state-of-the-art CTG methods across various datasets. Our findings reveal that gated toxicity avoidance efficiently achieves comparable levels of toxicity reduction to the original CTG methods while preserving the generation performance of the language model.
Submission Number: 2791
Loading