Recent advances in data-to-text generation have led to the use of large-scale datasets and neural network models which are trained end-to-end, without explicitly modeling what to say and in what order. In this work, we present a neural network architecture which incorporates content selection and planning without sacrificing end-to-end training. We decompose the generation task into two stages. Given a corpus of data records (paired with descriptive documents), we first generate a content plan highlighting which information should be mentioned and in which order and then generate the document while taking the content plan into account. Automatic and human-based evaluation experiments show that our model 1 outperforms strong baselines improving the state-of-the-art on the recently released ROTOWIRE dataset.

Recent approaches to data-to-text generation have shown great promise thanks to the use of large-scale datasets and the application of neural network architectures which are trained end-to-end. These models rely on representation learning to select content appropriately, structure it coherently, and verbalize it grammatically, treating entities as nothing more than vocabulary tokens. In this work we propose an entity-centric neural architecture for data-to-text generation. Our model creates entity-specific representations which are dynamically updated. Text is generated conditioned on the data input and entity memory representations using hierarchical attention at each time step. We present experiments on the ROTOWIRE benchmark and a (five times larger) new dataset on the baseball domain which we create. Our results show that the proposed model outperforms competitive baselines in automatic and human evaluation. 1

It has been shown that transition-based methods can be used for syntactic word ordering and tree linearization, achieving significantly faster speed compared with traditional best-first methods. State-of-the-art transitionbased models give competitive results on abstract word ordering and unlabeled tree linearization, but significantly worse results on labeled tree linearization. We demonstrate that the main cause for the performance bottleneck is the sparsity of SHIFT transition actions rather than heavy pruning. To address this issue, we propose a modification to the standard transition-based feature structure, which reduces feature sparsity and allows lookahead features at a small cost to decoding efficiency. Our model gives the best reported accuracies on all benchmarks, yet still being over 30 times faster compared with best-first-search.

We present Brahmi-Net -an online system for transliteration and script conversion for all major Indian language pairs (306 pairs). The system covers 13 Indo-Aryan languages, 4 Dravidian languages and English. For training the transliteration systems, we mined parallel transliteration corpora from parallel translation corpora using an unsupervised method and trained statistical transliteration systems using the mined corpora. Languages which do not have parallel corpora are supported by transliteration through a bridge language. Our script conversion system supports conversion between all Brahmi-derived scripts as well as ITRANS romanization scheme. For this, we leverage co-ordinated Unicode ranges between Indic scripts and use an extended ITRANS encoding for transliterating between English and Indic scripts. The system also provides top-k transliterations and simultaneous transliteration into multiple output languages. We provide a Python as well as REST API to access these services. The API and the mined transliteration corpus are made available for research use under an open source license.

Recent approaches to data-to-text generation have adopted the very successful encoder-decoder architecture or variants thereof. These models generate text that is fluent (but often imprecise) and perform quite poorly at selecting appropriate content and ordering it coherently. To overcome some of these issues, we propose a neural model with a macro planning stage followed by a generation stage reminiscent of traditional methods which embrace separate modules for planning and surface realization. Macro plans represent high level organization of important content such as entities, events, and their interactions; they are learned from data and given as input to the generator. Extensive experiments on two data-to-text benchmarks (RotoWire and MLB) show that our approach outperforms competitive baselines in terms of automatic and human evaluation.