FactSpotter: Evaluating the Factual Faithfulness of Graph-to-Text Generation

Kun Zhang, Oana Balalau, Ioana Manolescu


Abstract
Graph-to-text (G2T) generation takes a graph as input and aims to generate a fluent and faith- ful textual representation of the information in the graph. The task has many applications, such as dialogue generation and question an- swering. In this work, we investigate to what extent the G2T generation problem is solved for previously studied datasets, and how pro- posed metrics perform when comparing generated texts. To help address their limitations, we propose a new metric that correctly identifies factual faithfulness, i.e., given a triple (subject, predicate, object), it decides if the triple is present in a generated text. We show that our metric FactSpotter achieves the highest correlation with human annotations on data correct- ness, data coverage, and relevance. In addition, FactSpotter can be used as a plug-in feature to improve the factual faithfulness of existing models. Finally, we investigate if existing G2T datasets are still challenging for state-of-the-art models. Our code is available online: https://github.com/guihuzhang/FactSpotter.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.672
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
10025–10042
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.672
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.672
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kun Zhang, Oana Balalau, and Ioana Manolescu. 2023. FactSpotter: Evaluating the Factual Faithfulness of Graph-to-Text Generation. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 10025–10042, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
FactSpotter: Evaluating the Factual Faithfulness of Graph-to-Text Generation (Zhang et al., Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.672.pdf