Dominican Republic

Sentence splitting involves the segmentation of a sentence into two or more shorter sentences. It is a key component of sentence simplification, has been shown to help human comprehension and is a useful preprocessing step for NLP tasks such as summarisation and relation extraction. While several methods and datasets have been proposed for developing sentence splitting models, little attention has been paid to how sentence splitting interacts with discourse structure. In this work, we focus on cases where the input text contains a discourse connective, which we refer to as discourse-based sentence splitting. We create synthetic and organic datasets for discourse-based splitting and explore different ways of combining these datasets using different model architectures. We show that pipeline models which use discourse structure to mediate sentence splitting outperform end-to-end models in learning the various ways of expressing a discourse relation but generate text that is less grammatical; that large scale synthetic data provides a better basis for learning than smaller scale organic data; and that training on discourse-focused, rather than on general sentence splitting data provides a better basis for discourse splitting.

EMNLP 2021

Discourse-Based Sentence Splitting

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible. The experience for on-site participants would closely approximate a normal pre-COVID *ACL conference, with 5-6 thematically organized parallel sessions and live Q/A and interactive discussion immediately after the talks. Presentations by virtual participants will be equitably interleaved with those of on-site participants, projected on the auditorium screens as if on-site, and also followed immediately by live Q/A and interactive discussion at a time during reasonable waking hours for the virtual presenter. For all participants, on-site and virtual, who are unable to attend a session due to either time-zone issues or because they are participating in another session live, talk recordings and slides will be available online at a minimum after the live presentation (and in many cases before as well), and questions may be submitted in advance on session-specific discussion boards and answered live in session with the usual visual aids if desired.

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EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible.

technical paper

Recent developments in neural networks have led to the advance in data-to-text generation. However, the lack of ability of neural models to control the structure of generated output can be limiting in certain real-world applications. In this study, we propose a novel Plan-then-Generate (PlanGen) framework to improve the controllability of neural data-to-text models. Extensive experiments and analyses are conducted on two benchmark datasets, ToTTo and WebNLG. The results show that our model is able to control both the intra-sentence and inter-sentence structure of the generated output. Furthermore, empirical comparisons against previous state-of-the-art methods show that our model improves the generation quality as well as the output diversity as judged by human and automatic evaluations.

Plan-then-Generate: Controlled Data-to-Text Generation via Planning

Neural table-to-text generation models have achieved remarkable progress on an array of tasks. However, due to the data-hungry nature of neural models, their performances strongly rely on large-scale training examples, limiting their applicability in real-world applications. To address this, we propose a new framework: Prototype-to-Generate (P2G), for table-to-text generation under the few-shot scenario. The proposed framework utilizes the retrieved prototypes, which are jointly selected by an IR system and a novel prototype selector to help the model bridging the structural gap between tables and texts. Experimental results on three benchmark datasets with three state-of-the-art models demonstrate that the proposed framework significantly improves the model performance across various evaluation metrics.

Few-Shot Table-to-Text Generation with Prototype Memory

Large pre-trained neural models have recently shown remarkable progress in text generation. In this paper, we propose to generate text conditioned on the structured data (table) and a prefix (the written text) by leveraging the pre-trained models. We present a new data-to-text dataset, Table with Written Text (TWT), by repurposing two existing datasets: ToTTo and TabFact. TWT contains both factual and logical statements that are faithful to the structured data, aiming to serve as a useful benchmark for controlled text generation. Compared with existing data-to-text task settings, TWT is more intuitive, the prefix (usually provided by the user) controls the topic of the generated text. Existing methods usually output hallucinated text that is not faithful on TWT. Therefore, we design a novel approach with table-aware attention visibility and copy mechanism over the table. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods under both automatic and human evaluation metrics.

TWT: Table with Written Text for Controlled Data-to-Text Generation

Generating texts in scientific papers requires not only capturing the content contained within the given input but also frequently acquiring the external information called context. We push forward the scientific text generation by proposing a new task, namely context-aware text generation in the scientific domain, aiming at exploiting the contributions of context in generated texts. To this end, we present a novel challenging large-scale Scientific Paper Dataset for ConteXt-Aware Text Generation (SciXGen), consisting of well-annotated 205,304 papers with full references to widely-used objects (e.g., tables, figures, algorithms) in a paper. We comprehensively benchmark, using state-of-the-arts, the efficacy of our newly constructed SciXGen dataset in generating description and paragraph. Our dataset and benchmarks will be made publicly available to hopefully facilitate the scientific text generation research.

SciXGen: A Scientific Paper Dataset for Context-Aware Text Generation

While powerful pre-trained language models have improved the fluency of text generation models, semantic adequacy -the ability to generate text that is semantically faithful to the input- remains an unsolved issue. In this paper, we introduce a novel automatic evaluation metric, Entity-Based Semantic Adequacy, which can be used to assess to what extent generation models that verbalise RDF (Resource Description Framework) graphs produce text that contains mentions of the entities occurring in the RDF input. This is important as RDF subject and object entities make up 2/3 of the input. We use our metric to compare 25 models from the WebNLG Shared Tasks and we examine correlation with results from human evaluations of semantic adequacy. We show that while our metric correlates with human evaluation scores, this correlation varies with the specifics of the human evaluation setup. This suggests that in order to measure the entity-based adequacy of generated texts, an automatic metric such as the one proposed here might be more reliable, as less subjective and more focused on correct verbalisation of the input, than human evaluation measures.

Entity-Based Semantic Adequacy for Data-to-Text Generation

A hyperbole is an intentional and creative exaggeration not to be taken literally. Despite its ubiquity in daily life, the computational explorations of hyperboles are scarce. In this paper, we tackle the under-explored and challenging task: sentence-level hyperbole generation. 
We start with a representative syntactic pattern for intensification and systematically study the semantic (commonsense and counterfactual) relationships between each component in such hyperboles. We then leverage commonsense and counterfactual inference to generate hyperbole candidates based on our findings from the pattern, and train neural classifiers to rank and select high-quality hyperboles. 
Automatic and human evaluations show that our generation method is able to generate hyperboles with high success rate, intensity, funniness, and creativity.

HypoGen: Hyperbole Generation with Commonsense and Counterfactual Knowledge

Content-planning is an essential part of data-to-text generation to determine the order of data mentioned in generated texts. Recent neural data-to-text generation models employ Pointer Networks to explicitly learn content-plan given a set of attributes as input. They use LSTM to encode the input, which assumes a sequential relationship in the input. This may be sub-optimal to encode a set of attributes, where the attributes have a composite structure: the attributes are disordered while each attribute value is an ordered list of tokens. We handle this problem by proposing a neural content-planner that can capture both local and global contexts of such a structure. Specifically, we propose a novel attention mechanism called GSC-attention. A key component of the GSC-attention is grouped-attention, which is token-level attention constrained within each input attribute that enables our proposed model captures both local and global context. Moreover, our content-planner explicitly learns content-selection, which is integrated into the content-planner to select the most important data to be included in the generated text via an attention masking procedure. Experimental results show that our model outperforms the competitors by 4.92%, 4.70%, and 16.56% in terms of Damerau-Levenshtein Distance scores on three real-world datasets.

Grouped-Attention for Content-Selection and Content-Plan Generation

Image captioning systems are expected to have the ability to
combine individual concepts when describing scenes with concept combinations that are not observed during training. In spite of significant progress in image
captioning with the help of the autoregressive generation framework, current approaches fail to generalize well to novel concept combinations. We propose a new framework that revolves around probing several similar image caption training instances (retrieval), performing analogical reasoning over relevant entities in retrieved prototypes (analogy), and enhancing the generation process with reasoning outcomes (composition). Our method augments the generation model by referring to the neighboring instances in the training set to produce novel concept combinations in generated captions. We perform experiments on the widely used image captioning benchmarks. The proposed models achieve substantial improvement over the compared baselines on both composition-related evaluation metrics and conventional image captioning metrics.

Retrieval, Analogy, and Composition: A framework for Compositional Generalization in Image Captioning

Scripts – prototypical event sequences describing everyday activities – have been shown to help understand narratives by providing expectations, resolving ambiguity, and filling in unstated information. However, to date they have proved hard to author or extract from text. In this work, we demonstrate for the first time that pre-trained neural language models can be finetuned to generate high-quality scripts, at varying levels of granularity, for a wide range of everyday scenarios (e.g., bake a cake). To do this, we collect a large (6.4k) crowdsourced partially ordered scripts (named proScript), that is substantially larger than prior datasets, and develop models that generate scripts by combining language generation and graph structure prediction. We define two complementary tasks: (i) edge prediction: given a scenario and unordered events, organize the events into a valid (possibly partial-order) script, and (ii) script generation: given only a scenario, generate events and organize them into a (possibly partial-order) script. Our experiments show that our models perform well (e.g., F1=75.7 on task (i)), illustrating a new approach to overcoming previous barriers to script collection. We also show that there is still significant room for improvement toward human level performance. Together, our tasks, dataset, and models offer a new research direction for learning script knowledge.

proScript: Partially Ordered Scripts Generation

Transformer-based pre-trained language models boost the performance of open-domain dialogue systems. Prior works leverage Transformer-based pre-trained language models to generate texts with desired attributes in two general approaches: (1) gradient-based methods: updating all latent representations of pre-trained models with gradients from attribute models; (2) weighted-decoding methods: re-ranking beam candidates from pre-trained models with attribute functions. However, gradient-based methods lead to high computation cost and can easily get overfitted on small training sets, while weighted-decoding methods are inherently constrained by the low-variance high-bias pre-trained model. In this work, we propose a novel approach to control the generation of Transformer-based pre-trained language models: the SideControl framework, which leverages a novel control attributes loss to incorporate useful control signals, and is shown to perform well with very limited training samples. We evaluate our proposed method on two benchmark open-domain dialogue datasets, and results show that the SideControl framework has better controllability, higher generation quality and better sample-efficiency than existing gradient-based and weighted-decoding baselines.

Discourse-Based Sentence Splitting

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