UCTG: A Unified Controllable Text Generation Framework for Query Auto-Completion

Abstract

In the field of natural language generation (NLG), controlling text generation (CTG) is critical, particularly in query auto-completion (QAC) where the need for personalization and diversity is paramount. However, it is essentially challenging to adapt to various control objectives and constraints, which results in existing CTG approaches meeting with mixed success. This paper presents UCTG, a unified controllable text generation framework, which introduces a novel prompt learning method for CTG. Specifically, this framework seamlessly integrates a control module, a prompt module, and a generation module. The control module leverages a fine-tuned model to distill user preference features and behavioral patterns from historical data, incorporating human feedback into the model’s loss functions. These features are then transformed by the prompt module into vectors that guide the generation module. As such, the text generation can be flexibly controlled without modifying the task settings. By employing this unified approach, UCTG significantly improves query accuracy and coherence in tasks with different objectives and constraints, which is validated by extensive experiments on the Meituan and AOL real-world datasets. UCTG not only improves text generation control in QAC but also sets a new framework for flexible NLG applications.