Partially-Aligned Data-to-Text Generation with Distant Supervision

Abstract

The Data-to-Text task aims to generate humanreadable text for describing some given structured data enabling more interpretability. However, the typical generation task is confined to a few particular domains since it requires wellaligned data which is difficult and expensive to obtain. Using partially-aligned data is an alternative way of solving the dataset scarcity problem. This kind of data is much easier to obtain since it can be produced automatically. However, using this kind of data induces the over-generation problem posing difficulties for existing models, which tends to add unrelated excerpts during the generation procedure. In order to effectively utilize automatically annotated partially-aligned datasets, we extend the traditional generation task to a refined task called Partially-Aligned Data-to-Text Generation (PADTG) which is more practical since it utilizes automatically annotated data for training and thus considerably expands the application domains. To tackle this new task, we propose a novel distant supervision generation framework. It firstly estimates the input data's supportiveness for each target word with an estimator and then applies a supportiveness adaptor and a rebalanced beam search to harness the over-generation problem in the training and generation phases respectively. We also contribute a partially-aligned dataset 1 by sampling sentences from Wikipedia and automatically extracting corresponding KB triples for each sentence from Wikidata. The experimental results show that our framework outperforms all baseline models as well as verify the feasibility of utilizing partially-aligned data. 1 The data and source code of this paper can be obtained from https://github.com/fuzihaofzh/ distant_supervision_nlg <Company of Heroes, genre, strategy video game> Company of Heroes is a strategy video game developed in Canada. <Company of Heroes, genre, strategy video game> Company of Heroes is a strategy video game developed in Canada. Company of Heroes, genre, strategy video game Company of Heroes is a strategy video game developed in Canada.

Innovations in Neural Data-to-text Generation

“…al. [186] propose the adaptation of the seq2seq framework for their partially-algined dataset WITA using a supportiveness adaptor and a rebalanced beam search. The pre-trained adaptor calculates supportiveness scores for each word in the generated text with respect to the input.…”

ENT-DESC: Entity Description Generation by Exploring Knowledge Graph

“…Gardent et al (2017) introduced the WebNLG challenge, which aimed to generate text from a small set of RDF knowledge triples (no more than 7) that are well-aligned with the text. To avoid the high cost of preparing such well-aligned data, researchers also studied how to leverage automatically obtained partially-aligned data in which some portion of the output text cannot be generated from the input triples (Fu et al, 2020b). introduced AGENDA dataset, which aimed to generate paper abstract from a title and a small KG built by information extraction system on the abstracts and has at most 7 relations.…”

Dynamic Topic Tracker for KB-to-Text Generation

“…Wiseman et al (2017) generate basketball match descriptions based on the game records. Moreover, Fu et al (2020c) propose to directly train the model on partially-aligned data called WITA while Fu et al (2020b) propose to train a model based on purely unaligned data unsupervised with a dual learning framework. All of the above problems aim at converting some formatted data into natural language texts facilitating more understandability.…”