Compositional Generalization for Data-to-Text Generation

Xinnuo Xu, Ivan Titov, Mirella Lapata


Abstract
Data-to-text generation involves transforming structured data, often represented as predicate-argument tuples, into coherent textual descriptions. Despite recent advances, systems still struggle when confronted with unseen combinations of predicates, producing unfaithful descriptions (e.g.,hallucinations or omissions). We refer to this issue as compositional generalisation, and it encouraged us to create a benchmark for assessing the performance of different approaches on this specific problem. Furthermore, we propose a novel model that addresses compositional generalization by clustering predicates into groups. Our model generates text in a sentence-by-sentence manner, relying on one cluster of predicates at a time. This approach significantly outperforms T5-baselines across all evaluation metrics. Notably, it achieved a 31% improvement over T5 in terms of a metric focused on maintaining faithfulness to the input.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.623
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9299–9317
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.623
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.623
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xinnuo Xu, Ivan Titov, and Mirella Lapata. 2023. Compositional Generalization for Data-to-Text Generation. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 9299–9317, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Compositional Generalization for Data-to-Text Generation (Xu et al., Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-5/2023.findings-emnlp.623.pdf