The emergence of pre-trained models marks a significant juncture for the multilingual generation, offering unprecedented capabilities to comprehend and produce text across multiple languages. These models display commendable efficiency in high-resource languages. However, their performance notably falters in low-resource languages due to the extensive linguistic diversity encountered. Moreover, the existing works lack thorough analysis impairs the discovery of effective multilingual strategies, further complicating the advancement of current multilingual generation systems. This paper aims to appraise the efficacy of multilingual generation tasks, with a focus on summarization, through three resource availability scenarios: high-resource, low-resource, and zero-shot. We classify multilingual generation methodologies into three foundational categories based on their underlying modeling principles: Fine-tuning, Parameter-isolation, and Constraint-based approaches. Following this classification, we conduct a comprehensive comparative study of these methodologies across different resource contexts using two datasets that span six languages. This analysis provides insights into the unique advantages and limitations of each method. In addition, we introduce an innovative yet simple automatic metric LANGM designed to mitigate the prevalent problem of spurious correlations associated with language mixing. LANGM accurately measures the degree of code-mixing at the language level. Finally, we highlight several challenges and suggest potential avenues for future inquiry, aiming to spur further advancements within the field of multilingual text generation.

Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) is widely used in various applications. However, existing ASTE datasets are limited in their ability to represent real-world scenarios, hindering the advancement of research in this area. In this paper, we introduce a new dataset, named DMASTE, which is manually annotated to better fit real-world scenarios by providing more diverse and realistic reviews for the task. The dataset includes various lengths, diverse expressions, more aspect types, and more domains than existing datasets. We conduct extensive experiments on DMASTE in multiple settings to evaluate previous ASTE approaches. Empirical results demonstrate that DMASTE is a more challenging ASTE dataset. Further analyses of in-domain and cross-domain settings provide some promising directions for future research.

In document-level event extraction (DEE) tasks, a document typically contains many event records with multiple event roles. Therefore, accurately extracting all event records is a big challenge since the number of event records is not given. Previous works present the entity-based directed acyclic graph (EDAG) generation methods to autoregressively generate event roles, which requires a given generation order. Meanwhile, parallel methods are proposed to generate all event roles simultaneously, but suffer from the inadequate training which manifests zero accuracies on some event roles. In this paper, we propose an Iteratively Parallel Generation method with the Pre-Filling strategy (IPGPF). Event roles in an event record are generated in parallel to avoid order selection, and the event records are iteratively generated to utilize historical results. Experiments on two public datasets show our IPGPF improves 11.7 F1 than previous parallel models and up to 5.1 F1 than auto-regressive models under the control variable settings. Moreover, our enhanced IPGPF outperforms other entity-enhanced models and achieves new state-of-the-art performance.

We introduce MTG, a new benchmark suite for training and evaluating multilingual text generation. It is the first-proposed multilingual multiway text generation dataset with the largest human-annotated data (400k). It includes four generation tasks (story generation, question generation, title generation and text summarization) across five languages (English, German, French, Spanish and Chinese). The multiway setup enables testing knowledge transfer capabilities for a model across languages and tasks. Using MTG, we train and analyze several popular multilingual generation models from different aspects. Our benchmark suite fosters model performance enhancement with more human-annotated parallel data. It provides comprehensive evaluations with diverse generation scenarios. Code and data are available at https://github.com/zide05/MTG.

Neural abstractive summarization systems have gained significant progress in recent years. However, abstractive summarization often produce inconsisitent statements or false facts. How to automatically generate highly abstract yet factually correct summaries? In this paper, we proposed an efficient weak-supervised adversarial data augmentation approach to form the factual consistency dataset. Based on the artificial dataset, we train an evaluation model that can not only make accurate and robust factual consistency discrimination but is also capable of making interpretable factual errors tracing by backpropagated gradient distribution on token embeddings. Experiments and analysis conduct on public annotated summarization and factual consistency datasets demonstrate our approach effective and reasonable.

This paper proposes the building of Xiaomingbot, an intelligent, multilingual and multimodal software robot equipped with four inte- gral capabilities: news generation, news translation, news reading and avatar animation. Its system summarizes Chinese news that it automatically generates from data tables. Next, it translates the summary or the full article into multiple languages, and reads the multi- lingual rendition through synthesized speech. Notably, Xiaomingbot utilizes a voice cloning technology to synthesize the speech trained from a real person’s voice data in one input language. The proposed system enjoys several merits: it has an animated avatar, and is able to generate and read multilingual news. Since it was put into practice, Xiaomingbot has written over 600,000 articles, and gained over 150,000 followers on social media platforms.

Text attribute transfer is modifying certain linguistic attributes (e.g. sentiment, style, author-ship, etc.) of a sentence and transforming them from one type to another. In this paper, we aim to analyze and interpret what is changed during the transfer process. We start from the observation that in many existing models and datasets, certain words within a sentence play important roles in determining the sentence attribute class. These words are referred as the Pivot Words. Based on these pivot words, we propose a lexical analysis framework, the Pivot Analysis, to quantitatively analyze the effects of these words in text attribute classification and transfer. We apply this framework to existing datasets and models and show that: (1) the pivot words are strong features for the classification of sentence attributes; (2) to change the attribute of a sentence, many datasets only requires to change certain pivot words; (3) consequently, many transfer models only perform the lexical-level modification,while leaving higher-level sentence structures unchanged. Our work provides an in-depth understanding of linguistic attribute transfer and further identifies the future requirements and challenges of this task

Neural networks with tree-based sentence encoders have shown better results on many downstream tasks. Most of existing tree-based encoders adopt syntactic parsing trees as the explicit structure prior. To study the effectiveness of different tree structures, we replace the parsing trees with trivial trees (i.e., binary balanced tree, left-branching tree and right-branching tree) in the encoders. Though trivial trees contain no syntactic information, those encoders get competitive or even better results on all of the ten downstream tasks we investigated. This surprising result indicates that explicit syntax guidance may not be the main contributor to the superior performances of tree-based neural sentence modeling. Further analysis show that tree modeling gives better results when crucial words are closer to the final representation. Additional experiments give more clues on how to design an effective tree-based encoder. Our code is open-source and available at https://github.com/ExplorerFreda/TreeEnc.