Fine-Tuning, Prompting and RAG for Knowledge Graph-to-Russian Text Generation. How do these Methods generalise to Out-of-Distribution Data?

Anna Nikiforovskaya, William Eduardo Soto Martinez, Evan Parker Kelly Chapple, Claire Gardent


Abstract
Prior work on Knowledge Graph-to-Text generation has mostly evaluated models on in-domain test sets and/or with English as the target language. In contrast, we focus on Russian and we assess how various generation methods perform on out-of-domain, unseen data. Previous studies have shown that enriching the input with target-language verbalisations of entities and properties substantially improves the performance of fine-tuned models for Russian. We compare multiple variants of two contemporary paradigms — LLM prompting and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) — and investigate alternative ways to integrate such external knowledge into the generation process. Using automatic metrics and human evaluation, we find that on unseen data the fine-tuned model consistently underperforms, revealing limited generalisation capacity; that while it outperforms RAG by a small margin on most datasets, prompting generates less fluent text; and conversely, that RAG generates text that is less faithful to the input. Overall, both LLM prompting and RAG outperform Fine-Tuning across all unseen testsets. The code for this paper is available at https://github.com/Javanochka/KG-to-text-fine-tuning-prompting-rag
Anthology ID:
2025.inlg-main.26
Volume:
Proceedings of the 18th International Natural Language Generation Conference
Month:
October
Year:
2025
Address:
Hanoi, Vietnam
Editors:
Lucie Flek, Shashi Narayan, Lê Hồng Phương, Jiahuan Pei
Venue:
INLG
SIG:
SIGGEN
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
419–448
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-luhme/2025.inlg-main.26/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Anna Nikiforovskaya, William Eduardo Soto Martinez, Evan Parker Kelly Chapple, and Claire Gardent. 2025. Fine-Tuning, Prompting and RAG for Knowledge Graph-to-Russian Text Generation. How do these Methods generalise to Out-of-Distribution Data?. In Proceedings of the 18th International Natural Language Generation Conference, pages 419–448, Hanoi, Vietnam. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Fine-Tuning, Prompting and RAG for Knowledge Graph-to-Russian Text Generation. How do these Methods generalise to Out-of-Distribution Data? (Nikiforovskaya et al., INLG 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-luhme/2025.inlg-main.26.pdf