R2D2: Robust Data-to-Text with Replacement Detection

Linyong Nan, Lorenzo Jaime Flores, Yilun Zhao, Yixin Liu, Luke Benson, Weijin Zou, Dragomir Radev


Abstract
Unfaithful text generation is a common problem for text generation systems. In the case of Data-to-Text (D2T) systems, the factuality of the generated text is particularly crucial for any real-world applications. We introduce R2D2, a training framework that addresses unfaithful Data-to-Text generation by training a system both as a generator and a faithfulness discriminator with additional replacement detection and unlikelihood learning tasks. To facilitate such training, we propose two methods for sampling unfaithful sentences. We argue that the poor entity retrieval capability of D2T systems is one of the primary sources of unfaithfulness, so in addition to the existing metrics, we further propose named entity based metrics to evaluate the fidelity of D2T generations. Our experimental results show that R2D2 systems could effectively mitigate the unfaithful text generation, and they achieve new state-of-theart results on FeTaQA, LogicNLG, and ToTTo, all with significant improvements.
Anthology ID:
2022.emnlp-main.464
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Editors:
Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6903–6917
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.464
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-main.464
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Linyong Nan, Lorenzo Jaime Flores, Yilun Zhao, Yixin Liu, Luke Benson, Weijin Zou, and Dragomir Radev. 2022. R2D2: Robust Data-to-Text with Replacement Detection. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 6903–6917, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
R2D2: Robust Data-to-Text with Replacement Detection (Nan et al., EMNLP 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.464.pdf