ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
SAPPHIRE: Approaches for Enhanced Concept-to-Text Generation (2021)

We motivate and propose a suite of simple but effective improvements for concept-to-text generation called SAPPHIRE: Set Augmentation and Post-hoc PHrase Infilling and REcombination. We demonstrate their effectiveness on generative commonsense reasoning, a.k.a. the CommonGen task, through experiments using both BART and T5 models. Through extensive automatic and human evaluation, we show that SAPPHIRE noticeably improves model performance. An in-depth qualitative analysis illustrates that SAPPHIRE effectively addresses many issues of the baseline model generations, including lack of commonsense, insufficient specificity, and poor fluency.
Contextualizing Variation in Text Style Transfer Datasets (2021)

Text style transfer involves rewriting the content of a source sentence in a target style. Despite there being a number of style tasks with available data, there has been limited systematic discussion of how text style datasets relate to each other. This understanding, however, is likely to have implications for selecting multiple data sources for model training. While it is prudent to consider inherent stylistic properties when determining these relationships, we also must consider how a style is realized in a particular dataset. In this paper, we conduct several empirical analyses of existing text style datasets. Based on our results, we propose a categorization of stylistic and dataset properties to consider when utilizing or comparing text style datasets.
Generation Challenges: Results of the Accuracy Evaluation Shared Task (2021)

The Shared Task on Evaluating Accuracy focused on techniques (both manual and automatic) for evaluating the factual accuracy of texts produced by neural NLG systems, in a sports-reporting domain. Four teams submitted evaluation techniques for this task, using very different approaches and techniques. The best-performing submissions did encouragingly well at this difficult task. However, all automatic submissions struggled to detect factual errors which are semantically or pragmatically complex (for example, based on incorrect computation or inference).
The ReproGen Shared Task on Reproducibility of Human Evaluations in NLG: Overview and Results (2021)

The NLP field has recently seen a substantial increase in work related to reproducibility of results, and more generally in recognition of the importance of having shared definitions and practices relating to evaluation. Much of the work on reproducibility has so far focused on metric scores, with reproducibility of human evaluation results receiving far less attention. As part of a research programme designed to develop theory and practice of reproducibility assessment in NLP, we organised the first shared task on reproducibility of human evaluations, ReproGen 2021. This paper describes the shared task in detail, summarises results from each of the reproduction studies submitted, and provides further comparative analysis of the results. Out of nine initial team registrations, we received submissions from four teams. Meta-analysis of the four reproduction studies revealed varying degrees of reproducibility, and allowed very tentative first conclusions about what types of evaluation tend to have better reproducibility.
Text-in-Context: Token-Level Error Detection for Table-to-Text Generation (2021)

We present our Charles-UPF submission for the Shared Task on Evaluating Accuracy in Generated Texts at INLG 2021. Our system can detect the errors automatically using a combination of a rule-based natural language generation (NLG) system and pretrained language models (LMs). We first utilize a rule-based NLG system to generate sentences with facts that can be derived from the input. For each sentence we evaluate, we select a subset of facts which are relevant by measuring semantic similarity to the sentence in question. Finally, we finetune a pretrained language model on annotated data along with the relevant facts for fine-grained error detection. On the test set, we achieve 69{\%} recall and 75{\%} precision with a model trained on a mixture of human-annotated and synthetic data.
Shared Task in Evaluating Accuracy: Leveraging Pre-Annotations in the Validation Process (2021)

We hereby present our submission to the Shared Task in Evaluating Accuracy at the INLG 2021 Conference. Our evaluation protocol relies on three main components; rules and text classifiers that pre-annotate the dataset, a human annotator that validates the pre-annotations, and a web interface that facilitates this validation. Our submission consists in fact of two submissions; we first analyze solely the performance of the rules and classifiers (pre-annotations), and then the human evaluation aided by the former pre-annotations using the web interface (hybrid). The code for the web interface and the classifiers is publicly available.
Automatic Verification of Data Summaries (2021)

We present a generic method to compute thefactual accuracy of a generated data summarywith minimal user effort. We look at the prob-lem as a fact-checking task to verify the nu-merical claims in the text. The verification al-gorithm assumes that the data used to generatethe text is available. In this paper, we describehow the proposed solution has been used toidentify incorrect claims about basketball tex-tual summaries in the context of the AccuracyShared Task at INLG 2021.
Grounding NBA Matchup Summaries (2021)

The present paper summarizes an attempt we made to meet a shared task challenge on grounding machine-generated summaries of NBA matchups (\url{https://github.com/ehudreiter/accuracySharedTask.git}). In the first half, we discuss methods and in the second, we report results, together with a discussion on what feature may have had an effect on the performance.
Reproducing a Comparison of Hedged and Non-hedged NLG Texts (2021)

This paper describes an attempt to reproduce an earlier experiment, previously conducted by the author, that compares hedged and non-hedged NLG texts as part of the ReproGen shared challenge. This reproduction effort was only able to partially replicate results from the original study. The analyisis from this reproduction effort suggests that whilst it is possible to replicate the procedural aspects of a previous study, replicating the results can prove more challenging as differences in participant type can have a potential impact.
Another PASS: A Reproduction Study of the Human Evaluation of a Football Report Generation System (2021)

This paper reports results from a reproduction study in which we repeated the human evaluation of the PASS Dutch-language football report generation system (van der Lee et al., 2017). The work was carried out as part of the ReproGen Shared Task on Reproducibility of Human Evaluations in NLG, in Track A (Paper 1). We aimed to repeat the original study exactly, with the main difference that a different set of evaluators was used. We describe the study design, present the results from the original and the reproduction study, and then compare and analyse the differences between the two sets of results. For the two {\textquoteleft}headline' results of average Fluency and Clarity, we find that in both studies, the system was rated more highly for Clarity than for Fluency, and Clarity had higher standard deviation. Clarity and Fluency ratings were higher, and their standard deviations lower, in the reproduction study than in the original study by substantial margins. Clarity had a higher degree of reproducibility than Fluency, as measured by the coefficient of variation. Data and code are publicly available.
A Reproduction Study of an Annotation-based Human Evaluation of MT Outputs (2021)

In this paper we report our reproduction study of the Croatian part of an annotation-based human evaluation of machine-translated user reviews (Popovic, 2020). The work was carried out as part of the ReproGen Shared Task on Reproducibility of Human Evaluation in NLG. Our aim was to repeat the original study exactly, except for using a different set of evaluators. We describe the experimental design, characterise differences between original and reproduction study, and present the results from each study, along with analysis of the similarity between them. For the six main evaluation results of Major/Minor/All Comprehension error rates and Major/Minor/All Adequacy error rates, we find that (i) 4/6 system rankings are the same in both studies, (ii) the relative differences between systems are replicated well for Major Comprehension and Adequacy (Pearson`s {\ensuremath{>}} 0.9), but not for the corresponding Minor error rates (Pearson`s 0.36 for Adequacy, 0.67 for Comprehension), and (iii) the individual system scores for both types of Minor error rates had a higher degree of reproducibility than the corresponding Major error rates. We also examine inter-annotator agreement and compare the annotations obtained in the original and reproduction studies.
TUDA-Reproducibility @ ReproGen: Replicability of Human Evaluation of Text-to-Text and Concept-to-Text Generation (2021)

This paper describes our contribution to the Shared Task ReproGen by Belz et al. (2021), which investigates the reproducibility of human evaluations in the context of Natural Language Generation. We selected the paper {\textquotedblleft}Generation of Company descriptions using concept-to-text and text-to-text deep models: data set collection and systems evaluation{\textquotedblright} (Qader et al., 2018) and aimed to replicate, as closely to the original as possible, the human evaluation and the subsequent comparison between the human judgements and the automatic evaluation metrics. Here, we first outline the text generation task of the paper of Qader et al. (2018). Then, we document how we approached our replication of the paper`s human evaluation. We also discuss the difficulties we encountered and which information was missing. Our replication has medium to strong correlation (0.66 Spearman overall) with the original results of Qader et al. (2018), but due to the missing information about how Qader et al. (2018) compared the human judgements with the metric scores, we have refrained from reproducing this comparison.
DialogSum Challenge: Summarizing Real-Life Scenario Dialogues (2021)

We propose a shared task on summarizing real-life scenario dialogues, DialogSum Challenge, to encourage researchers to address challenges in dialogue summarization, which has been less studied by the summarization community. Real-life scenario dialogue summarization has a wide potential application prospect in chat-bot and personal assistant. It contains unique challenges such as special discourse structure, coreference, pragmatics, and social common sense, which require specific representation learning technologies to deal with. We carefully annotate a large-scale dialogue summarization dataset based on multiple public dialogue corpus, opening the door to all kinds of summarization models.
Quality Evaluation of the Low-Resource Synthetically Generated Code-Mixed Hinglish Text (2021)

In this shared task, we seek the participating teams to investigate the factors influencing the quality of the code-mixed text generation systems. We synthetically generate code-mixed Hinglish sentences using two distinct approaches and employ human annotators to rate the generation quality. We propose two subtasks, quality rating prediction and annotators' disagreement prediction of the synthetic Hinglish dataset. The proposed subtasks will put forward the reasoning and explanation of the factors influencing the quality and human perception of the code-mixed text.
Shared Task on Feedback Comment Generation for Language Learners (2021)

In this paper, we propose a generation challenge called Feedback comment generation for language learners. It is a task where given a text and a span, a system generates, for the span, an explanatory note that helps the writer (language learner) improve their writing skills. The motivations for this challenge are: (i) practically, it will be beneficial for both language learners and teachers if a computer-assisted language learning system can provide feedback comments just as human teachers do; (ii) theoretically, feedback comment generation for language learners has a mixed aspect of other generation tasks together with its unique features and it will be interesting to explore what kind of generation technique is effective against what kind of writing rule. To this end, we have created a dataset and developed baseline systems to estimate baseline performance. With these preparations, we propose a generation challenge of feedback comment generation.
The SelectGen Challenge: Finding the Best Training Samples for Few-Shot Neural Text Generation (2021)

We propose a shared task on training instance selection for few-shot neural text generation. Large-scale pretrained language models have led to dramatic improvements in few-shot text generation. Nonetheless, almost all previous work simply applies random sampling to select the few-shot training instances. Little to no attention has been paid to the selection strategies and how they would affect model performance. Studying the selection strategy can help us (1) make the most use of our annotation budget in downstream tasks and (2) better benchmark few-shot text generative models. We welcome submissions that present their selection strategies and the effects on the generation quality.
Affective Decoding for Empathetic Response Generation (2021)

Understanding speaker`s feelings and producing appropriate responses with emotion connection is a key communicative skill for empathetic dialogue systems. In this paper, we propose a simple technique called Affective Decoding for empathetic response generation. Our method can effectively incorporate emotion signals during each decoding step, and can additionally be augmented with an auxiliary dual emotion encoder, which learns separate embeddings for the speaker and listener given the emotion base of the dialogue. Extensive empirical studies show that our models are perceived to be more empathetic by human evaluations, in comparison to several strong mainstream methods for empathetic responding.
Controllable Sentence Simplification with a Unified Text-to-Text Transfer Transformer (2021)

Recently, a large pre-trained language model called T5 (A Unified Text-to-Text Transfer Transformer) has achieved state-of-the-art performance in many NLP tasks. However, no study has been found using this pre-trained model on Text Simplification. Therefore in this paper, we explore the use of T5 fine-tuning on Text Simplification combining with a controllable mechanism to regulate the system outputs that can help generate adapted text for different target audiences. Our experiments show that our model achieves remarkable results with gains of between +0.69 and +1.41 over the current state-of-the-art (BART+ACCESS). We argue that using a pre-trained model such as T5, trained on several tasks with large amounts of data, can help improve Text Simplification.
SEPRG: Sentiment aware Emotion controlled Personalized Response Generation (2021)

Social chatbots have gained immense popularity, and their appeal lies not just in their capacity to respond to the diverse requests from users, but also in the ability to develop an emotional connection with users. To further develop and promote social chatbots, we need to concentrate on increasing user interaction and take into account both the intellectual and emotional quotient in the conversational agents. Therefore, in this work, we propose the task of sentiment aware emotion controlled personalized dialogue generation giving the machine the capability to respond emotionally and in accordance with the persona of the user. As sentiment and emotions are highly co-related, we use the sentiment knowledge of the previous utterance to generate the correct emotional response in accordance with the user persona. We design a Transformer based Dialogue Generation framework, that generates responses that are sensitive to the emotion of the user and corresponds to the persona and sentiment as well. Moreover, the persona information is encoded by a different Transformer encoder, along with the dialogue history, is fed to the decoder for generating responses. We annotate the PersonaChat dataset with sentiment information to improve the response quality. Experimental results on the PersonaChat dataset show that the proposed framework significantly outperforms the existing baselines, thereby generating personalized emotional responses in accordance with the sentiment that provides better emotional connection and user satisfaction as desired in a social chatbot.
Biomedical Data-to-Text Generation via Fine-Tuning Transformers (2021)

Data-to-text (D2T) generation in the biomedical domain is a promising - yet mostly unexplored - field of research. Here, we apply neural models for D2T generation to a real-world dataset consisting of package leaflets of European medicines. We show that fine-tuned transformers are able to generate realistic, multi-sentence text from data in the biomedical domain, yet have important limitations. We also release a new dataset (BioLeaflets) for benchmarking D2T generation models in the biomedical domain.
Decoding, Fast and Slow: A Case Study on Balancing Trade-Offs in Incremental, Character-level Pragmatic Reasoning (2021)

Recent work has adopted models of pragmatic reasoning for the generation of informative language in, e.g., image captioning. We propose a simple but highly effective relaxation of fully rational decoding, based on an existing incremental and character-level approach to pragmatically informative neural image captioning. We implement a mixed, {\textquoteleft}fast' and {\textquoteleft}slow', speaker that applies pragmatic reasoning occasionally (only word-initially), while unrolling the language model. In our evaluation, we find that increased informativeness through pragmatic decoding generally lowers quality and, somewhat counter-intuitively, increases repetitiveness in captions. Our mixed speaker, however, achieves a good balance between quality and informativeness.
GraphPlan: Story Generation by Planning with Event Graph (2021)

Story generation is a task that aims to automatically generate a meaningful story. This task is challenging because it requires high-level understanding of the semantic meaning of sentences and causality of story events. Naivesequence-to-sequence models generally fail to acquire such knowledge, as it is difficult to guarantee logical correctness in a text generation model without strategic planning. In this study, we focus on planning a sequence of events assisted by event graphs and use the events to guide the generator. Rather than using a sequence-to-sequence model to output a sequence, as in some existing works, we propose to generate an event sequence by walking on an event graph. The event graphs are built automatically based on the corpus. To evaluate the proposed approach, we incorporate human participation, both in event planning and story generation. Based on the largescale human annotation results, our proposed approach has been shown to provide more logically correct event sequences and stories compared with previous approaches.
BERT-based distractor generation for Swedish reading comprehension questions using a small-scale dataset (2021)

An important part when constructing multiple-choice questions (MCQs) for reading comprehension assessment are the distractors, the incorrect but preferably plausible answer options. In this paper, we present a new BERT-based method for automatically generating distractors using only a small-scale dataset. We also release a new such dataset of Swedish MCQs (used for training the model), and propose a methodology for assessing the generated distractors. Evaluation shows that from a student`s perspective, our method generated one or more plausible distractors for more than 50{\%} of the MCQs in our test set. From a teacher`s perspective, about 50{\%} of the generated distractors were deemed appropriate. We also do a thorough analysis of the results.
Exploring Structural Encoding for Data-to-Text Generation (2021)

Due to efficient end-to-end training and fluency in generated texts, several encoder-decoder framework-based models are recently proposed for data-to-text generations. Appropriate encoding of input data is a crucial part of such encoder-decoder models. However, only a few research works have concentrated on proper encoding methods. This paper presents a novel encoder-decoder based data-to-text generation model where the proposed encoder carefully encodes input data according to underlying structure of the data. The effectiveness of the proposed encoder is evaluated both extrinsically and intrinsically by shuffling input data without changing meaning of that data. For selecting appropriate content information in encoded data from encoder, the proposed model incorporates attention gates in the decoder. With extensive experiments on WikiBio and E2E dataset, we show that our model outperforms the state-of-the models and several standard baseline systems. Analysis of the model through component ablation tests and human evaluation endorse the proposed model as a well-grounded system.
Attention Is Indeed All You Need: Semantically Attention-Guided Decoding for Data-to-Text NLG (2021)

Ever since neural models were adopted in data-to-text language generation, they have invariably been reliant on extrinsic components to improve their semantic accuracy, because the models normally do not exhibit the ability to generate text that reliably mentions all of the information provided in the input. In this paper, we propose a novel decoding method that extracts interpretable information from encoder-decoder models' cross-attention, and uses it to infer which attributes are mentioned in the generated text, which is subsequently used to rescore beam hypotheses. Using this decoding method with T5 and BART, we show on three datasets its ability to dramatically reduce semantic errors in the generated outputs, while maintaining their state-of-the-art quality.
Constrained Decoding for Technical Term Retention in English-Hindi MT (2021)

Technical terms may require special handling when the target audience is bilingual, depending on the cultural and educational norms of the society in question. In particular, certain translation scenarios may require {\textquotedblleft}term retention{\textquotedblright} i.e. preserving of the source language technical terms in the target language output to produce a fluent and comprehensible code-switched sentence. We show that a standard transformer-based machine translation model can be adapted easily to perform this task with little or no damage to the general quality of its output. We present an English-to-Hindi model that is trained to obey a {\textquotedblleft}retain{\textquotedblright} signal, i.e. it can perform the required code-mixing on a list of terms, possibly unseen, provided at runtime. We perform automatic evaluation using BLEU as well as F1 metrics on the list of retained terms; we also collect manual judgments on the quality of the output sentences.