Data-to-text generation models face challenges in ensuring data fidelity by referring to the correct input source. To inspire studies in this area, Wiseman et al. (2017) introduced the RotoWire corpus on generating NBA game summaries from the box- and line-score tables. However, limited attempts have been made in this direction and the challenges remain. We observe a prominent bottleneck in the corpus where only about 60% of the summary contents can be grounded to the boxscore records. Such information deficiency tends to misguide a conditioned language model to produce unconditioned random facts and thus leads to factual hallucinations. In this work, we restore the information balance and revamp this task to focus on fact-grounded data-to-text generation. We introduce a purified and larger-scale dataset, RotoWire-FG (Fact-Grounding), with 50% more data from the year 2017-19 and enriched input tables, and hope to attract research focuses in this direction. Moreover, we achieve improved data fidelity over the state-of-the-art models by integrating a new form of table reconstruction as an auxiliary task to boost the generation quality.

Word Embeddings have recently imposed themselves as a standard for representing word meaning in NLP. Semantic similarity between word pairs has become the most common evaluation benchmark for these representations, with vector cosine being typically used as the only similarity metric. In this paper, we report experiments with a rank-based metric for WE, which performs comparably to vector cosine in similarity estimation and outperforms it in the recently-introduced and challenging task of outlier detection, thus suggesting that rank-based measures can improve clustering quality.

Singlish can be interesting to the ACL community both linguistically as a major creole based on English, and computationally for information extraction and sentiment analysis of regional social media. We investigate dependency parsing of Singlish by constructing a dependency treebank under the Universal Dependencies scheme, and then training a neural network model by integrating English syntactic knowledge into a state-of-the-art parser trained on the Singlish treebank. Results show that English knowledge can lead to 25% relative error reduction, resulting in a parser of 84.47% accuracies. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to use neural stacking to improve cross-lingual dependency parsing on low-resource languages. We make both our annotation and parser available for further research.