Task: Question Generation
Input (English): Methods ::: Length Token Method
Our first approach to control the length is inspired by target forcing in multilingual NMT BIBREF15, BIBREF16. We first split the training sentence pairs into three groups according to the target/source length ratio (in terms of characters). Ideally, we want a group where the target is shorter than the source (short), one where they are equally-sized (normal) and a last group where the target is longer than the source (long). In practice, we select two thresholds $t_\text{min}$ and $t_\text{max}$ according to the length ratio distribution. All the sentence pairs with length ratio between $t_\text{min}$ and $t_\text{max}$ are in the normal group, the ones with ratio below $t_\text{min}$ in short and the remaining in long. At training time we prepend a length token to each source sentence according to its group ($<$short$>$, $<$normal$>$, or $<$long$>$), in order to let a single network to discriminate between the groups (see Figure FIGREF2). At inference time, the length token is used to bias the network to generate a translation that belongs to the desired length group.
Output (English): How do they condition the output to a given target-source class?