Towards Faithful Neural Table-to-Text Generation with Content-Matching Constraints

Zhenyi Wang, Xiaoyang Wang, Bang An, Dong Yu, Changyou Chen


Abstract
Text generation from a knowledge base aims to translate knowledge triples to natural language descriptions. Most existing methods ignore the faithfulness between a generated text description and the original table, leading to generated information that goes beyond the content of the table. In this paper, for the first time, we propose a novel Transformer-based generation framework to achieve the goal. The core techniques in our method to enforce faithfulness include a new table-text optimal-transport matching loss and a table-text embedding similarity loss based on the Transformer model. Furthermore, to evaluate faithfulness, we propose a new automatic metric specialized to the table-to-text generation problem. We also provide detailed analysis on each component of our model in our experiments. Automatic and human evaluations show that our framework can significantly outperform state-of-the-art by a large margin.
Anthology ID:
2020.acl-main.101
Volume:
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Dan Jurafsky, Joyce Chai, Natalie Schluter, Joel Tetreault
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1072–1086
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.101
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.101
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhenyi Wang, Xiaoyang Wang, Bang An, Dong Yu, and Changyou Chen. 2020. Towards Faithful Neural Table-to-Text Generation with Content-Matching Constraints. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 1072–1086, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Towards Faithful Neural Table-to-Text Generation with Content-Matching Constraints (Wang et al., ACL 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.101.pdf
Video:
 http://slideslive.com/38929079
Data
Wikipedia Person and Animal Dataset