ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Deep Graph Convolutional Encoders for Structured Data to Text Generation (2018)

Most previous work on neural text generation from graph-structured data relies on standard sequence-to-sequence methods. These approaches linearise the input graph to be fed to a recurrent neural network. In this paper, we propose an alternative encoder based on graph convolutional networks that directly exploits the input structure. We report results on two graph-to-sequence datasets that empirically show the benefits of explicitly encoding the input graph structure.
Describing a Knowledge Base (2018)

We aim to automatically generate natural language descriptions about an input structured knowledge base (KB). We build our generation framework based on a pointer network which can copy facts from the input KB, and add two attention mechanisms: (i) \textit{slot-aware attention} to capture the association between a slot type and its corresponding slot value; and (ii) a new \textit{table position self-attention} to capture the inter-dependencies among related slots. For evaluation, besides standard metrics including BLEU, METEOR, and ROUGE, we propose a \textit{KB reconstruction} based metric by extracting a KB from the generation output and comparing it with the input KB. We also create a new data set which includes 106,216 pairs of structured KBs and their corresponding natural language descriptions for two distinct entity types. Experiments show that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods. The reconstructed KB achieves 68.8{\%} - 72.6{\%} F-score.
Syntactic Manipulation for Generating more Diverse and Interesting Texts (2018)

Natural Language Generation plays an important role in the domain of dialogue systems as it determines how users perceive the system. Recently, deep-learning based systems have been proposed to tackle this task, as they generalize better and require less amounts of manual effort to implement them for new domains. However, deep learning systems usually adapt a very homogeneous sounding writing style which expresses little variation. In this work, we present our system for Natural Language Generation where we control various aspects of the surface realization in order to increase the lexical variability of the utterances, such that they sound more diverse and interesting. For this, we use a Semantically Controlled Long Short-term Memory Network (SC-LSTM), and apply its specialized cell to control various syntactic features of the generated texts. We present an in-depth human evaluation where we show the effects of these surface manipulation on the perception of potential users.
Automated learning of templates for data-to-text generation: comparing rule-based, statistical and neural methods (2018)

The current study investigated novel techniques and methods for trainable approaches to data-to-text generation. Neural Machine Translation was explored for the conversion from data to text as well as the addition of extra templatization steps of the data input and text output in the conversion process. Evaluation using BLEU did not find the Neural Machine Translation technique to perform any better compared to rule-based or Statistical Machine Translation, and the templatization method seemed to perform similarly or sometimes worse compared to direct data-to-text conversion. However, the human evaluation metrics indicated that Neural Machine Translation yielded the highest quality output and that the templatization method was able to increase text quality in multiple situations.
End-to-End Content and Plan Selection for Data-to-Text Generation (2018)

Learning to generate fluent natural language from structured data with neural networks has become an common approach for NLG. This problem can be challenging when the form of the structured data varies between examples. This paper presents a survey of several extensions to sequence-to-sequence models to account for the latent content selection process, particularly variants of copy attention and coverage decoding. We further propose a training method based on diverse ensembling to encourage models to learn distinct sentence templates during training. An empirical evaluation of these techniques shows an increase in the quality of generated text across five automated metrics, as well as human evaluation.
SimpleNLG-ZH: a Linguistic Realisation Engine for Mandarin (2018)

We introduce SimpleNLG-ZH, a realisation engine for Mandarin that follows the software design paradigm of SimpleNLG (Gatt and Reiter, 2009). We explain the core grammar (morphology and syntax) and the lexicon of SimpleNLG-ZH, which is very different from English and other languages for which SimpleNLG engines have been built. The system was evaluated by regenerating expressions from a body of test sentences and a corpus of human-authored expressions. Human evaluation was conducted to estimate the quality of regenerated sentences.
Adapting SimpleNLG to Galician language (2018)

In this paper, we describe SimpleNLG-GL, an adaptation of the linguistic realisation SimpleNLG library for the Galician language. This implementation is derived from SimpleNLG-ES, the English-Spanish version of this library. It has been tested using a battery of examples which covers the most common rules for Galician.
Going Dutch: Creating SimpleNLG-NL (2018)

This paper presents SimpleNLG-NL, an adaptation of the SimpleNLG surface realisation engine for the Dutch language. It describes a novel method for determining and testing the grammatical constructions to be implemented, using target sentences sampled from a treebank.
Learning to Flip the Bias of News Headlines (2018)

This paper introduces the task of {\textquotedblleft}flipping{\textquotedblright} the bias of news articles: Given an article with a political bias (left or right), generate an article with the same topic but opposite bias. To study this task, we create a corpus with bias-labeled articles from \textit{all-sides.com}. As a first step, we analyze the corpus and discuss intrinsic characteristics of bias. They point to the main challenges of bias flipping, which in turn lead to a specific setting in the generation process. The paper in hand narrows down the general bias flipping task to focus on bias flipping for news article \textit{headlines}. A manual annotation of headlines from each side reveals that they are self-informative in general and often convey bias. We apply an autoencoder incorporating information from an article`s content to learn how to automatically flip the bias. From 200 generated headlines, 73 are classified as understandable by annotators, and 83 maintain the topic while having opposite bias. Insights from our analysis shed light on how to solve the main challenges of bias flipping.
Stylistically User-Specific Generation (2018)

Recent neural models for response generation show good results in terms of general responses. In real conversations, however, depending on the speaker/responder, similar utterances should require different responses. In this study, we attempt to consider individual user`s information in adjusting the notable sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) model for more diverse, user-specific responses. We assume that we need user-specific features to adjust the response and we argue that some selected representative words from the users are suitable for this task. Furthermore, we prove that even for unseen or unknown users, our model can provide more diverse and interesting responses, while maintaining correlation with input utterances. Experimental results with human evaluation show that our model can generate more interesting responses than the popular seq2seqmodel and achieve higher relevance with input utterances than our baseline.
Explainable Autonomy: A Study of Explanation Styles for Building Clear Mental Models (2018)

As unmanned vehicles become more autonomous, it is important to maintain a high level of transparency regarding their behaviour and how they operate. This is particularly important in remote locations where they cannot be directly observed. Here, we describe a method for generating explanations in natural language of autonomous system behaviour and reasoning. Our method involves deriving an interpretable model of autonomy through having an expert {\textquoteleft}speak aloud' and providing various levels of detail based on this model. Through an online evaluation study with operators, we show it is best to generate explanations with multiple possible reasons but tersely worded. This work has implications for designing interfaces for autonomy as well as for explainable AI and operator training.
Treat the system like a human student: Automatic naturalness evaluation of generated text without reference texts (2018)

The current most popular method for automatic Natural Language Generation (NLG) evaluation is comparing generated text with human-written reference sentences using a metrics system, which has drawbacks around reliability and scalability. We draw inspiration from second language (L2) assessment and extract a set of linguistic features to predict human judgments of sentence naturalness. Our experiment using a small dataset showed that the feature-based approach yields promising results, with the added potential of providing interpretability into the source of the problems.
Content Aware Source Code Change Description Generation (2018)

We propose to study the generation of descriptions from source code changes by integrating the messages included on code commits and the intra-code documentation inside the source in the form of docstrings. Our hypothesis is that although both types of descriptions are not directly aligned in semantic terms {---}one explaining a change and the other the actual functionality of the code being modified{---} there could be certain common ground that is useful for the generation. To this end, we propose an architecture that uses the source code-docstring relationship to guide the description generation. We discuss the results of the approach comparing against a baseline based on a sequence-to-sequence model, using standard automatic natural language generation metrics as well as with a human study, thus offering a comprehensive view of the feasibility of the approach.
Improving Context Modelling in Multimodal Dialogue Generation (2018)

In this work, we investigate the task of textual response generation in a multimodal task-oriented dialogue system. Our work is based on the recently released Multimodal Dialogue (MMD) dataset (Saha et al., 2017) in the fashion domain. We introduce a multimodal extension to the Hierarchical Recurrent Encoder-Decoder (HRED) model and show that this extension outperforms strong baselines in terms of text-based similarity metrics. We also showcase the shortcomings of current vision and language models by performing an error analysis on our system`s output.
Generating Market Comments Referring to External Resources (2018)

Comments on a stock market often include the reason or cause of changes in stock prices, such as {\textquotedblleft}Nikkei turns lower as yen`s rise hits exporters.{\textquotedblright} Generating such informative sentences requires capturing the relationship between different resources, including a target stock price. In this paper, we propose a model for automatically generating such informative market comments that refer to external resources. We evaluated our model through an automatic metric in terms of BLEU and human evaluation done by an expert in finance. The results show that our model outperforms the existing model both in BLEU scores and human judgment.
SpatialVOC2K: A Multilingual Dataset of Images with Annotations and Features for Spatial Relations between Objects (2018)

We present SpatialVOC2K, the first multilingual image dataset with spatial relation annotations and object features for image-to-text generation, built using 2,026 images from the PASCAL VOC2008 dataset. The dataset incorporates (i) the labelled object bounding boxes from VOC2008, (ii) geometrical, language and depth features for each object, and (iii) for each pair of objects in both orders, (a) the single best preposition and (b) the set of possible prepositions in the given language that describe the spatial relationship between the two objects. Compared to previous versions of the dataset, we have roughly doubled the size for French, and completely reannotated as well as increased the size of the English portion, providing single best prepositions for English for the first time. Furthermore, we have added explicit 3D depth features for objects. We are releasing our dataset for free reuse, along with evaluation tools to enable comparative evaluation.
Adding the Third Dimension to Spatial Relation Detection in 2D Images (2018)

Detection of spatial relations between objects in images is currently a popular subject in image description research. A range of different language and geometric object features have been used in this context, but methods have not so far used explicit information about the third dimension (depth), except when manually added to annotations. The lack of such information hampers detection of spatial relations that are inherently 3D. In this paper, we use a fully automatic method for creating a depth map of an image and derive several different object-level depth features from it which we add to an existing feature set to test the effect on spatial relation detection. We show that performance increases are obtained from adding depth features in all scenarios tested.
Automatic Opinion Question Generation (2018)

We study the problem of opinion question generation from sentences with the help of community-based question answering systems. For this purpose, we use a sequence to sequence attentional model, and we adopt coverage mechanism to prevent sentences from repeating themselves. Experimental results on the Amazon question/answer dataset show an improvement in automatic evaluation metrics as well as human evaluations from the state-of-the-art question generation systems.
Modelling Pro-drop with the Rational Speech Acts Model (2018)

We extend the classic Referring Expressions Generation task by considering zero pronouns in {\textquotedblleft}pro-drop{\textquotedblright} languages such as Chinese, modelling their use by means of the Bayesian Rational Speech Acts model (Frank and Goodman, 2012). By assuming that highly salient referents are most likely to be referred to by zero pronouns (i.e., pro-drop is more likely for salient referents than the less salient ones), the model offers an attractive explanation of a phenomenon not previously addressed probabilistically.
Self-Learning Architecture for Natural Language Generation (2018)

In this paper, we propose a self-learning architecture for generating natural language templates for conversational assistants. Generating templates to cover all the combinations of slots in an intent is time consuming and labor-intensive. We examine three different models based on our proposed architecture - Rule-based model, Sequence-to-Sequence (Seq2Seq) model and Semantically Conditioned LSTM (SC-LSTM) model for the IoT domain - to reduce the human labor required for template generation. We demonstrate the feasibility of template generation for the IoT domain using our self-learning architecture. In both automatic and human evaluation, the self-learning architecture outperforms previous works trained with a fully human-labeled dataset. This is promising for commercial conversational assistant solutions.
Enriching the WebNLG corpus (2018)

This paper describes the enrichment of WebNLG corpus (Gardent et al., 2017a,b), with the aim to further extend its usefulness as a resource for evaluating common NLG tasks, including Discourse Ordering, Lexicalization and Referring Expression Generation. We also produce a silver-standard German translation of the corpus to enable the exploitation of NLG approaches to other languages than English. The enriched corpus is publicly available.
Towards making NLG a voice for interpretable Machine Learning (2018)

This paper presents a study to understand the issues related to using NLG to humanise explanations from a popular interpretable machine learning framework called LIME. Our study shows that self-reported rating of NLG explanation was higher than that for a non-NLG explanation. However, when tested for comprehension, the results were not as clear-cut showing the need for performing more studies to uncover the factors responsible for high-quality NLG explanations.
Template-based multilingual football reports generation using Wikidata as a knowledge base (2018)

This paper presents a new version of a football reports generation system called PASS. The original version generated Dutch text and relied on a limited hand-crafted knowledge base. We describe how, in a short amount of time, we extended PASS to produce English texts, exploiting machine translation and Wikidata as a large-scale source of multilingual knowledge.
Automatic Evaluation of Neural Personality-based Chatbots (2018)

Stylistic variation is critical to render the utterances generated by conversational agents natural and engaging. In this paper, we focus on sequence-to-sequence models for open-domain dialogue response generation and propose a new method to evaluate the extent to which such models are able to generate responses that reflect different personality traits.
Poem Machine - a Co-creative NLG Web Application for Poem Writing (2018)

We present Poem Machine, an interactive online tool for co-authoring Finnish poetry with a computationally creative agent. Poem Machine can produce poetry of its own and assist the user in authoring poems. The main target group for the system is primary school children, and its use as a part of teaching is currently under study.
Japanese Advertising Slogan Generator using Case Frame and Word Vector (2018)

There has been many works published for automatic sentence generation of a variety of domains. However, there would be still no single method available at present that can generate sentences for all of domains. Each domain will require a suitable generation method. We focus on automatic generation of Japanese advertisement slogans in this paper. We use our advertisement slogan database, case frame information, and word vector information. We employed our system to apply for a copy competition for human copywriters, where our advertisement slogan was left as a finalist. Our system could be regarded as the world first system that generates slogans in a practical level, as an advertising agency already employs our system in their business.
Underspecified Universal Dependency Structures as Inputs for Multilingual Surface Realisation (2018)

In this paper, we present the datasets used in the Shallow and Deep Tracks of the First Multilingual Surface Realisation Shared Task (SR`18). For the Shallow Track, data in ten languages has been released: Arabic, Czech, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. For the Deep Track, data in three languages is made available: English, French and Spanish. We describe in detail how the datasets were derived from the Universal Dependencies V2.0, and report on an evaluation of the Deep Track input quality. In addition, we examine the motivation for, and likely usefulness of, deriving NLG inputs from annotations in resources originally developed for Natural Language Understanding (NLU), and assess whether the resulting inputs supply enough information of the right kind for the final stage in the NLG process.
LSTM Hypertagging (2018)

Hypertagging, or supertagging for surface realization, is the process of assigning lexical categories to nodes in an input semantic graph. Previous work has shown that hypertagging significantly increases realization speed and quality by reducing the search space of the realizer. Building on recent work using LSTMs to improve accuracy on supertagging for parsing, we develop an LSTM hypertagging method for OpenCCG, an open source NLP toolkit for CCG. Our results show significant improvements in both hypertagging accuracy and downstream realization performance.
Sequence-to-Sequence Models for Data-to-Text Natural Language Generation: Word- vs. Character-based Processing and Output Diversity (2018)

We present a comparison of word-based and character-based sequence-to-sequence models for data-to-text natural language generation, which generate natural language descriptions for structured inputs. On the datasets of two recent generation challenges, our models achieve comparable or better automatic evaluation results than the best challenge submissions. Subsequent detailed statistical and human analyses shed light on the differences between the two input representations and the diversity of the generated texts. In a controlled experiment with synthetic training data generated from templates, we demonstrate the ability of neural models to learn novel combinations of the templates and thereby generalize beyond the linguistic structures they were trained on.
Generating E-Commerce Product Titles and Predicting their Quality (2018)

E-commerce platforms present products using titles that summarize product information. These titles cannot be created by hand, therefore an algorithmic solution is required. The task of automatically generating these titles given noisy user provided titles is one way to achieve the goal. The setting requires the generation process to be fast and the generated title to be both human-readable and concise. Furthermore, we need to understand if such generated titles are usable. As such, we propose approaches that (i) automatically generate product titles, (ii) predict their quality. Our approach scales to millions of products and both automatic and human evaluations performed on real-world data indicate our approaches are effective and applicable to existing e-commerce scenarios.
Designing and testing the messages produced by a virtual dietitian (2018)

This paper presents a project about the automatic generation of persuasive messages in the context of the diet management. In the first part of the paper we introduce the basic mechanisms related to data interpretation and content selection for a numerical data-to-text generation architecture. In the second part of the paper we discuss a number of factors influencing the design of the messages. In particular, we consider the design of the aggregation procedure. Finally, we present the results of a human-based evaluation concerning this design factor.
Generation of Company descriptions using concept-to-text and text-to-text deep models: dataset collection and systems evaluation (2018)

In this paper we study the performance of several state-of-the-art sequence-to-sequence models applied to generation of short company descriptions. The models are evaluated on a newly created and publicly available company dataset that has been collected from Wikipedia. The dataset consists of around 51K company descriptions that can be used for both concept-to-text and text-to-text generation tasks. Automatic metrics and human evaluation scores computed on the generated company descriptions show promising results despite the difficulty of the task as the dataset (like most available datasets) has not been originally designed for machine learning. In addition, we perform correlation analysis between automatic metrics and human evaluations and show that certain automatic metrics are more correlated to human judgments.