Question: What is a bifocal attention mechanism?

Evidence:
raw_evidence: 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.
Fused Bifocal Attention Mechanism
Intuitively, when a human writes a description from a table she keeps track of information at two levels. At the macro level, it is important to decide which is the appropriate field to attend to next and at a micro level (i.e., within a field) it is important to know which values to attend to next. To capture this behavior, we use a bifocal attention mechanism as described below.
Fused Attention: Intuitively, the attention weights assigned to a field should have an influence on all the values belonging to the particular field. To ensure this, we reweigh the micro level attention weights based on the corresponding macro level attention weights. In other words, we fuse the attention weights at the two levels as: DISPLAYFORM0
where INLINEFORM0 is the field corresponding to the INLINEFORM1 -th value, INLINEFORM2 is the macro level context vector.

Answers:
At the macro level, it is important to decide which is the appropriate field to attend to next, micro level (i.e., within a field) it is important to know which values to attend to next, fuse the attention weights at the two levels