PoMo: Generating Entity-Specific Post-Modifiers in Context

Jun Seok Kang, Robert Logan, Zewei Chu, Yang Chen, Dheeru Dua, Kevin Gimpel, Sameer Singh, Niranjan Balasubramanian


Abstract
We introduce entity post-modifier generation as an instance of a collaborative writing task. Given a sentence about a target entity, the task is to automatically generate a post-modifier phrase that provides contextually relevant information about the entity. For example, for the sentence, “Barack Obama, _______, supported the #MeToo movement.”, the phrase “a father of two girls” is a contextually relevant post-modifier. To this end, we build PoMo, a post-modifier dataset created automatically from news articles reflecting a journalistic need for incorporating entity information that is relevant to a particular news event. PoMo consists of more than 231K sentences with post-modifiers and associated facts extracted from Wikidata for around 57K unique entities. We use crowdsourcing to show that modeling contextual relevance is necessary for accurate post-modifier generation. We adapt a number of existing generation approaches as baselines for this dataset. Our results show there is large room for improvement in terms of both identifying relevant facts to include (knowing which claims are relevant gives a >20% improvement in BLEU score), and generating appropriate post-modifier text for the context (providing relevant claims is not sufficient for accurate generation). We conduct an error analysis that suggests promising directions for future research.
Anthology ID:
N19-1089
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Jill Burstein, Christy Doran, Thamar Solorio
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
826–838
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1089
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N19-1089
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jun Seok Kang, Robert Logan, Zewei Chu, Yang Chen, Dheeru Dua, Kevin Gimpel, Sameer Singh, and Niranjan Balasubramanian. 2019. PoMo: Generating Entity-Specific Post-Modifiers in Context. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), pages 826–838, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
PoMo: Generating Entity-Specific Post-Modifiers in Context (Kang et al., NAACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1089.pdf
Data
PoMoNew York Times Annotated Corpus