Creating Training Corpora for NLG Micro-Planners

Claire Gardent, Anastasia Shimorina, Shashi Narayan, Laura Perez-Beltrachini


Abstract
In this paper, we present a novel framework for semi-automatically creating linguistically challenging micro-planning data-to-text corpora from existing Knowledge Bases. Because our method pairs data of varying size and shape with texts ranging from simple clauses to short texts, a dataset created using this framework provides a challenging benchmark for microplanning. Another feature of this framework is that it can be applied to any large scale knowledge base and can therefore be used to train and learn KB verbalisers. We apply our framework to DBpedia data and compare the resulting dataset with Wen et al. 2016’s. We show that while Wen et al.’s dataset is more than twice larger than ours, it is less diverse both in terms of input and in terms of text. We thus propose our corpus generation framework as a novel method for creating challenging data sets from which NLG models can be learned which are capable of handling the complex interactions occurring during in micro-planning between lexicalisation, aggregation, surface realisation, referring expression generation and sentence segmentation. To encourage researchers to take up this challenge, we made available a dataset of 21,855 data/text pairs created using this framework in the context of the WebNLG shared task.
Anthology ID:
P17-1017
Volume:
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2017
Address:
Vancouver, Canada
Editors:
Regina Barzilay, Min-Yen Kan
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
179–188
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P17-1017
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P17-1017
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Claire Gardent, Anastasia Shimorina, Shashi Narayan, and Laura Perez-Beltrachini. 2017. Creating Training Corpora for NLG Micro-Planners. In Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 179–188, Vancouver, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Creating Training Corpora for NLG Micro-Planners (Gardent et al., ACL 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P17-1017.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/P17-1017.mp4
Data
WebNLG