Recent neural models have shown significant progress on the problem of generating short descriptive texts conditioned on a small number of database records. In this work, we suggest a slightly more difficult data-to-text generation task, and investigate how effective current approaches are on this task. In particular, we introduce a new, large-scale corpus of data records paired with descriptive documents, propose a series of extractive evaluation methods for analyzing performance, and obtain baseline results using current neural generation methods. Experiments show that these models produce fluent text, but fail to convincingly approximate humangenerated documents. Moreover, even templated baselines exceed the performance of these neural models on some metrics, though copy-and reconstructionbased extensions lead to noticeable improvements.
REF study the difficulty of applying neural models to the data-to-text task.
Challenges in Data-to-Document Generation
ArXiv
ArXiv
Computer Science