Although neural table-to-text models have achieved remarkable progress with the help of large-scale datasets, they suffer insufficient learning problem with limited training data. Recently, pre-trained language models show potential in few-shot learning with linguistic knowledge learnt from pretraining on large-scale corpus. However, benefiting table-to-text generation in few-shot setting with the powerful pretrained language model faces three challenges, including (1) the gap between the task’s structured input and the natural language input for pretraining language model. (2) The lack of modeling for table structure and (3) improving text fidelity with less incorrect expressions that are contradicting to the table. To address aforementioned problems, we propose TableGPT for table-to-text generation. At first, we utilize table transformation module with template to rewrite structured table in natural language as input for GPT-2. In addition, we exploit multi-task learning with two auxiliary tasks that preserve table’s structural information by reconstructing the structure from GPT-2’s representation and improving the text’s fidelity with content matching task aligning the table and information in the generated text. By experimenting on Humans, Songs and Books, three few-shot table-to-text datasets in different domains, our model outperforms existing systems on most few-shot settings.

Complex questions in reading comprehension tasks require integrating information from multiple sentences. In this work, to answer such questions involving temporal and causal relations, we generate event graphs from text based on dependencies, and rank answers by aligning event graphs. In particular, the alignments are constrained by graph-based reasoning to ensure temporal and causal agreement. Our focused approach self-adaptively complements existing solutions; it is automatically triggered only when applicable. Experiments on RACE and MCTest show that state-of-the-art methods are notably improved by using our approach as an add-on.