Generating texts from structured data (e.g., a table) is important for various natural language processing tasks such as question answering and dialog systems. In recent studies, researchers use neural language models and encoder-decoder frameworks for table-to-text generation. However, these neural network-based approaches do not model the order of contents during text generation. When a human writes a summary based on a given table, he or she would probably consider the content order before wording. In a biography, for example, the nationality of a person is typically mentioned before occupation in a biography. In this paper, we propose an order-planning text generation model to capture the relationship between different fields and use such relationship to make the generated text more fluent and smooth. We conducted experiments on the WikiBio dataset and achieve significantly higher performance than previous methods in terms of BLEU, ROUGE, and NIST scores.
Text generation has long aroused interest in the NLP community due to is wide applications including automated navigation @cite_2 and weather forecasting @cite_7 . Traditionally, text generation can be divided into several steps @cite_1 : defines what information should be conveyed in the generated sentence; (2) determines what to generate in each sentence; and (3) actually generates those sentences with words.
@cite_1 @cite_7 @cite_2
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A challenging problem for spoken dialog systems is the design of utterance generation modules that are fast, flexible and general, yet produce high quality output in particular domains. A promising approach is trainable generation, which uses general-purpose linguistic knowledge automatically adapted to the application domain. This paper presents a trainable sentence planner for the MATCH dialog system. We show that trainable sentence planning can produce output comparable to that of MATCH's template-based generator even for quite complex information presentations. One of the main challenges in automatically generating textual weather forecasts is choosing appropriate English words to communicate numeric weather data. A corpus-based analysis of how humans write forecasts showed that there were major differences in how individual writers performed this task, that is, in how they translated data into words. These differences included both different preferences between potential near-synonyms that could be used to express information, and also differences in the meanings that individual writers associated with specific words. Because we thought these differences could confuse readers, we built our SumTime-Mousam weather-forecast generator to use consistent data-to-word rules, which avoided words which were only used by a few people, and words which were interpreted differently by different people. An evaluation by forecast users suggested that they preferred SumTime-Mousam's texts to human-generated texts, in part because of better word choice; this may be the first time that an evaluation has shown that nlg texts are better than human-authored texts. In this paper we tackle the problem of generating natural route descriptions on the basis of input obtained from a commercially available way-finding system. Our framework and architecture incorporates the use of generic natural language generation techniques. Through examples we demonstrate that it is possible to bridge the gap between underlying representation and natural sounding descriptions. The work presented contributes both to the area of natural language generation and to the improvement of way-finding system interfaces.