Multiple business scenarios require an automated generation of descriptive human-readable text from structured input data. This has resulted into substantial work on fact-to-text generation systems recently. Unfortunately, previous work on fact-to-text (F2T) generation has focused primarily on English mainly due to the high availability of relevant datasets. Only recently, the problem of cross-lingual fact-to-text (XF2T) was proposed for generation across multiple languages alongwith a dataset, XAlign for eight languages. However, there has been no rigorous work on the actual XF2T generation problem. We extend XAlign dataset with annotated data for four more languages: Punjabi, Malayalam, Assamese and Oriya. We conduct an extensive study using popular Transformer-based text generation models on our extended multi-lingual dataset, which we call XAlignV2. Further, we investigate the performance of different text generation strategies: multiple variations of pretraining, fact-aware embeddings and structure-aware input encoding. Our extensive experiments show that a multi-lingual mT5 model which uses fact-aware embeddings with structure-aware input encoding leads to best results (30.90 BLEU, 55.12 METEOR and 59.17 chrF++) across the twelve languages. We make our code, dataset and model publicly available, and hope that this will help advance further research in this critical area.
This paper presents our submission to the WebNLG Challenge 2023 for generating text in several low-resource languages from RDF-triples. Our submission focuses on using machine translation for generating texts in Irish, Maltese, Welsh and Russian. While a simple and straightfoward approach, recent works have shown that using monolingual models for inference for multilingual tasks with the help of machine translation (translate-test) can out-perform multilingual models and training multilingual models on machine-translated data (translate-train) through careful tuning of the MT component. Our results show that this approach demonstrates competitive performance for this task even with limited data.
The Clickbait Challenge targets spoiling the clickbaits using short pieces of information known as spoilers to satisfy the curiosity induced by a clickbait post. The large context of the article associated with the clickbait and differences in the spoiler forms, make the task challenging. Hence, to tackle the large context, we propose an Information Condensation-based approach, which prunes down the unnecessary context. Given an article, our filtering module optimised with a contrastive learning objective first selects the parapraphs that are the most relevant to the corresponding clickbait.The resulting condensed article is then fed to the two downstream tasks of spoiler type classification and spoiler generation. We demonstrate and analyze the gains from this approach on both the tasks. Overall, we win the task of spoiler type classification and achieve competitive results on spoiler generation.
Massive knowledge graphs like Wikidata attempt to capture world knowledge about multiple entities. Recent approaches concentrate on automatically enriching these KGs from text. However a lot of information present in the form of natural text in low resource languages is often missed out. Cross Lingual Information Extraction aims at extracting factual information in the form of English triples from low resource Indian Language text. Despite its massive potential, progress made on this task is lagging when compared to Monolingual Information Extraction. In this paper, we propose the task of Cross Lingual Fact Extraction(CLFE) from text and devise an end-to-end generative approach for the same which achieves an overall F1 score of 77.46