QuestEval is a reference-less metric used in text-to-text tasks, that compares the generated summaries directly to the source text, by automatically asking and answering questions. Its adaptation to Data-to-Text tasks is not straightforward, as it requires multimodal Question Generation and Answering systems on the considered tasks, which are seldom available. To this purpose, we propose a method to build synthetic multimodal corpora enabling to train multimodal components for a data-QuestEval metric. The resulting metric is reference-less and multimodal; it obtains state-of-the-art correlations with human judgment on the WebNLG and WikiBio benchmarks. We make data-QuestEval’s code and models available for reproducibility purpose, as part of the QuestEval project.

State-of-the-art NLP models can adopt shallow heuristics that limit their generalization capability (McCoy et al., 2019). Such heuristics include lexical overlap with the training set in Named-Entity Recognition (Taille et al., 2020) and Event or Type heuristics in Relation Extraction (Rosenman et al., 2020). In the more realistic end-to-end RE setting, we can expect yet another heuristic: the mere retention of training relation triples. In this paper we propose two experiments confirming that retention of known facts is a key factor of performance on standard benchmarks. Furthermore, one experiment suggests that a pipeline model able to use intermediate type representations is less prone to over-rely on retention.

In language generation models conditioned by structured data, the classical training via maximum likelihood almost always leads models to pick up on dataset divergence (i.e., hallucinations or omissions), and to incorporate them erroneously in their own generations at inference. In this work, we build on top of previous Reinforcement Learning based approaches and show that a model-agnostic framework relying on the recently introduced PARENT metric is efficient at reducing both hallucinations and omissions. Evaluations on the widely used WikiBIO and WebNLG benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of this framework compared to state-of-the-art models.

Despite efforts to distinguish three different evaluation setups (Bekoulis et al., 2018), numerous end-to-end Relation Extraction (RE) articles present unreliable performance comparison to previous work. In this paper, we first identify several patterns of invalid comparisons in published papers and describe them to avoid their propagation. We then propose a small empirical study to quantify the most common mistake’s impact and evaluate it leads to overestimating the final RE performance by around 5% on ACE05. We also seize this opportunity to study the unexplored ablations of two recent developments: the use of language model pretraining (specifically BERT) and span-level NER. This meta-analysis emphasizes the need for rigor in the report of both the evaluation setting and the dataset statistics. We finally call for unifying the evaluation setting in end-to-end RE.