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.
We present a simple, robust generation system which performs content selection and surface realization in a unified, domain-independent framework. In our approach, we break up the end-to-end generation process into a sequence of local decisions, arranged hierarchically and each trained discriminatively. We deployed our system in three different domains---Robocup sportscasting, technical weather forecasts, and common weather forecasts, obtaining results comparable to state-of-the-art domain-specific systems both in terms of BLEU scores and human evaluation. This article challenges the received wisdom that template-based approaches to the generation of language are necessarily inferior to other approaches as regards their maintainability, linguistic well-foundedness, and quality of output. Some recent NLG systems that call themselves ''template-based'' will illustrate our claims. Two important recent trends in natural language generation are (i) probabilistic techniques and (ii) comprehensive approaches that move away from traditional strictly modular and sequential models. This paper reports experiments in which pCRU a generation framework that combines probabilistic generation methodology with a comprehensive model of the generation space was used to semi-automatically create five different versions of a weather forecast generator. The generators were evaluated in terms of output quality, development time and computational efficiency against (i) human forecasters, (ii) a traditional handcrafted pipelined NLG system and (iii) a HALOGEN-style statistical generator. The most striking result is that despite acquiring all decision-making abilities automatically, the best pCRU generators produce outputs of high enough quality to be scored more highly by human judges than forecasts written by experts.