Lorenzo Jaime Flores


2023

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LoFT: Enhancing Faithfulness and Diversity for Table-to-Text Generation via Logic Form Control
Yilun Zhao | Zhenting Qi | Linyong Nan | Lorenzo Jaime Flores | Dragomir Radev
Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Logical Table-to-Text (LT2T) generation is tasked with generating logically faithful sentences from tables. There currently exists two challenges in the field: 1) Faithfulness: how to generate sentences that are factually correct given the table content; 2) Diversity: how to generate multiple sentences that offer different perspectives on the table. This work proposes LoFT, which utilizes logic forms as fact verifiers and content planners to control LT2T generation. Experimental results on the LogicNLG dataset demonstrate that LoFT is the first model that addresses unfaithfulness and lack of diversity issues simultaneously. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Yale-LILY/LoFT.

2022

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Look Ma, Only 400 Samples! Revisiting the Effectiveness of Automatic N-Gram Rule Generation for Spelling Normalization in Filipino
Lorenzo Jaime Flores | Dragomir Radev
Proceedings of The Third Workshop on Simple and Efficient Natural Language Processing (SustaiNLP)

With 84.75 million Filipinos online, the ability for models to process online text is crucial for developing Filipino NLP applications. To this end, spelling correction is a crucial preprocessing step for downstream processing. However, the lack of data prevents the use of language models for this task. In this paper, we propose an N-Gram + Damerau-Levenshtein distance model with automatic rule extraction. We train the model on 300 samples, and show that despite limited training data, it achieves good performance and outperforms other deep learning approaches in terms of accuracy and edit distance. Moreover, the model (1) requires little compute power, (2) trains in little time, thus allowing for retraining, and (3) is easily interpretable, allowing for direct troubleshooting, highlighting the success of traditional approaches over more complex deep learning models in settings where data is unavailable.

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R2D2: Robust Data-to-Text with Replacement Detection
Linyong Nan | Lorenzo Jaime Flores | Yilun Zhao | Yixin Liu | Luke Benson | Weijin Zou | Dragomir Radev
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Unfaithful text generation is a common problem for text generation systems. In the case of Data-to-Text (D2T) systems, the factuality of the generated text is particularly crucial for any real-world applications. We introduce R2D2, a training framework that addresses unfaithful Data-to-Text generation by training a system both as a generator and a faithfulness discriminator with additional replacement detection and unlikelihood learning tasks. To facilitate such training, we propose two methods for sampling unfaithful sentences. We argue that the poor entity retrieval capability of D2T systems is one of the primary sources of unfaithfulness, so in addition to the existing metrics, we further propose named entity based metrics to evaluate the fidelity of D2T generations. Our experimental results show that R2D2 systems could effectively mitigate the unfaithful text generation, and they achieve new state-of-theart results on FeTaQA, LogicNLG, and ToTTo, all with significant improvements.