Question: Is the task done on structured data only?
Evidence: Rendering natural language descriptions from structured data is required in a wide variety of commercial applications such as generating descriptions of products, hotels, furniture, etc., from a corresponding table of facts about the entity. Such a table typically contains {field, value} pairs where the field is a property of the entity (e.g., color) and the value is a set of possible assignments to this property (e.g., color = red). Another example of this is the recently introduced task of generating one line biography descriptions from a given Wikipedia infobox BIBREF0 . The Wikipedia infobox serves as a table of facts about a person and the first sentence from the corresponding article serves as a one line description of the person. Figure FIGREF2 illustrates an example input infobox which contains fields such as Born, Residence, Nationality, Fields, Institutions and Alma Mater. Each field further contains some words (e.g., particle physics, many-body theory, etc.). The corresponding description is coherent with the information contained in the infobox.
Note that the number of fields in the infobox and the ordering of the fields within the infobox varies from person to person. Given the large size (700K examples) and heterogeneous nature of the dataset which contains biographies of people from different backgrounds (sports, politics, arts, etc.), it is hard to come up with simple rule-based templates for generating natural language descriptions from infoboxes, thereby making a case for data-driven models. Based on the recent success of data-driven neural models for various other NLG tasks BIBREF1 , BIBREF2 , BIBREF3 , BIBREF4 , BIBREF5 , one simple choice is to treat the infobox as a sequence of {field, value} pairs and use a standard seq2seq model for this task. However, such a model is too generic and does not exploit the specific characteristics of this task as explained below. First, note that while generating such descriptions from structured data, a human keeps track of information at two levels. Specifically, at a macro level, she would first decide which field to mention next and then at a micro level decide which of the values in the field needs to be mentioned next. For example, she first decides that at the current step, the field occupation needs attention and then decides which is the next appropriate occupation to attend to from the set of occupations (actor, director, producer, etc.). To enable this, we use a bifocal attention mechanism which computes an attention over fields at a macro level and over values at a micro level. We then fuse these attention weights such that the attention weight for a field also influences the attention over the values within it. Finally, we feed a fused context vector to the decoder which contains both field level and word level information. Note that such two-level attention mechanisms BIBREF6 , BIBREF7 , BIBREF8 have been used in the context of unstructured data (as opposed to structured data in our case), where at a macro level one needs to pay attention to sentences and at a micro level to words in the sentences.
Next, we observe that while rendering the output, once the model pays attention to a field (say, occupation) it needs to stay on this field for a few timesteps (till all the occupations are produced in the output). We refer to this as the stay on behavior. Further, we note that once the tokens of a field are referred to, they are usually not referred to later. For example, once all the occupations have been listed in the output we will never visit the occupation field again because there is nothing left to say about it. We refer to this as the never look back behavior. To model the stay on behaviour, we introduce a forget (or remember) gate which acts as a signal to decide when to forget the current field (or equivalently to decide till when to remember the current field). To model the never look back behaviour we introduce a gated orthogonalization mechanism which ensures that once a field is forgotten, subsequent field context vectors fed to the decoder are orthogonal to (or different from) the previous field context vectors.
We experiment with the WikiBio dataset BIBREF0 which contains around 700K {infobox, description} pairs and has a vocabulary of around 400K words. We show that the proposed model gives a relative improvement of 21% and 20% as compared to current state of the art models BIBREF0 , BIBREF9 on this dataset. The proposed model also gives a relative improvement of 10% as compared to the basic seq2seq model. Further, we introduce new datasets for French and German on the same lines as the English WikiBio dataset. Even on these two datasets, our model outperforms the state of the art methods mentioned above.
However, these works deal with unstructured data (sentences at the higher level and words at a lower level) as opposed to structured data in our case.
Answer: Yes.