Few-Shot NLG with Pre-Trained Language Model
Zhiyu Chen, Harini Eavani, Wenhu Chen, Yinyin Liu, William Yang Wang
Abstract
Neural-based end-to-end approaches to natural language generation (NLG) from structured data or knowledge are data-hungry, making their adoption for real-world applications difficult with limited data. In this work, we propose the new task of few-shot natural language generation. Motivated by how humans tend to summarize tabular data, we propose a simple yet effective approach and show that it not only demonstrates strong performance but also provides good generalization across domains. The design of the model architecture is based on two aspects: content selection from input data and language modeling to compose coherent sentences, which can be acquired from prior knowledge. With just 200 training examples, across multiple domains, we show that our approach achieves very reasonable performances and outperforms the strongest baseline by an average of over 8.0 BLEU points improvement. Our code and data can be found at https://github.com/czyssrs/Few-Shot-NLG- Anthology ID:
- 2020.acl-main.18
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2020
- Address:
- Online
- Editors:
- Dan Jurafsky, Joyce Chai, Natalie Schluter, Joel Tetreault
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 183–190
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.18
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.18
- Cite (ACL):
- Zhiyu Chen, Harini Eavani, Wenhu Chen, Yinyin Liu, and William Yang Wang. 2020. Few-Shot NLG with Pre-Trained Language Model. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 183–190, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Few-Shot NLG with Pre-Trained Language Model (Chen et al., ACL 2020)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/emnlp-22-attachments/2020.acl-main.18.pdf
- Code
- czyssrs/Few-Shot-NLG + additional community code
- Data
- WikiBio