Synthetically created Cross-Lingual Summarisation (CLS) datasets are prone to include document-summary pairs where the reference summary is unfaithful to the corresponding document as it contains content not supported by the document (i.e., hallucinated content). This low data quality misleads model learning and obscures evaluation results. Automatic ways to assess hallucinations and improve training have been proposed for monolingual summarisation, predominantly in English. For CLS, we propose to use off-the-shelf cross-lingual Natural Language Inference (X-NLI) to evaluate faithfulness of reference and model generated summaries. Then, we study training approaches that are aware of faithfulness issues in the training data and propose an approach that uses unlikelihood loss to teach a model about unfaithful summary sequences. Our results show that it is possible to train CLS models that yield more faithful and at the same time informative summaries.

We study existing approaches to leverage off-the-shelf Natural Language Inference (NLI) models for the evaluation of summary faithfulness and argue that these are sub-optimal due to the granularity level considered for premises and hypotheses. That is, the smaller content unit considered as hypothesis is a sentence and premises are made up of a fixed number of document sentences. We propose a novel approach, namely INFUSE, that uses a variable premise size and simplifies summary sentences into shorter hypotheses. Departing from previous studies which focus on single short document summarisation, we analyse NLI based faithfulness evaluation for diverse summarisation tasks. We introduce DiverSumm, a new benchmark comprising long form summarisation (long documents and summaries) and diverse summarisation tasks (e.g., meeting and multi-document summarisation). In experiments, INFUSE obtains superior performance across the different summarisation tasks.

In this work we study user controlled table-to-text generation where users explore the content in a table by selecting cells and reading a natural language description thereof automatically produce by a natural language generator. Such generation models usually learn from carefully selected cell combinations (clean cell selections); however, in practice users may select unexpected, redundant, or incoherent cell combinations (noisy cell selections). In experiments, we find that models perform well on test sets coming from the same distribution as the train data but their performance drops when evaluated on realistic noisy user inputs. We propose a fine-tuning regime with additional user-simulated noisy cell selections. Models fine-tuned with the proposed regime gain 4.85 BLEU points on user noisy test cases and 1.4 on clean test cases; and achieve comparable state-of-the-art performance on the ToTTo dataset.

In this paper, we are interested in developing semantic parsers which understand natural language questions embedded in a conversation with a user and ground them to formal queries over definitions in a general purpose knowledge graph (KG) with very large vocabularies (covering thousands of concept names and relations, and millions of entities). To this end, we develop a dataset where user questions are annotated with Sparql parses and system answers correspond to execution results thereof. We present two different semantic parsing approaches and highlight the challenges of the task: dealing with large vocabularies, modelling conversation context, predicting queries with multiple entities, and generalising to new questions at test time. We hope our dataset will serve as useful testbed for the development of conversational semantic parsers. Our dataset and models are released at https://github.com/EdinburghNLP/SPICE.

Evaluations in machine learning rarely use the latest metrics, datasets, or human evaluation in favor of remaining compatible with prior work. The compatibility, often facilitated through leaderboards, thus leads to outdated but standardized evaluation practices. We pose that the standardization is taking place in the wrong spot. Evaluation infrastructure should enable researchers to use the latest methods and what should be standardized instead is how to incorporate these new evaluation advances. We introduce GEMv2, the new version of the Generation, Evaluation, and Metrics Benchmark which uses a modular infrastructure for dataset, model, and metric developers to benefit from each other’s work. GEMv2 supports 40 documented datasets in 51 languages, ongoing online evaluation for all datasets, and our interactive tools make it easier to add new datasets to the living benchmark.

We introduce GEM, a living benchmark for natural language Generation (NLG), its Evaluation, and Metrics. Measuring progress in NLG relies on a constantly evolving ecosystem of automated metrics, datasets, and human evaluation standards. Due to this moving target, new models often still evaluate on divergent anglo-centric corpora with well-established, but flawed, metrics. This disconnect makes it challenging to identify the limitations of current models and opportunities for progress. Addressing this limitation, GEM provides an environment in which models can easily be applied to a wide set of tasks and in which evaluation strategies can be tested. Regular updates to the benchmark will help NLG research become more multilingual and evolve the challenge alongside models. This paper serves as the description of the data for the 2021 shared task at the associated GEM Workshop.

We present a cross-lingual summarisation corpus with long documents in a source language associated with multi-sentence summaries in a target language. The corpus covers twelve language pairs and directions for four European languages, namely Czech, English, French and German, and the methodology for its creation can be applied to several other languages. We derive cross-lingual document-summary instances from Wikipedia by combining lead paragraphs and articles’ bodies from language aligned Wikipedia titles. We analyse the proposed cross-lingual summarisation task with automatic metrics and validate it with a human study. To illustrate the utility of our dataset we report experiments with multi-lingual pre-trained models in supervised, zero- and few-shot, and out-of-domain scenarios.

Existing neural generation approaches create multi-sentence text as a single sequence. In this paper we propose a structured convolutional decoder that is guided by the content structure of target summaries. We compare our model with existing sequential decoders on three data sets representing different domains. Automatic and human evaluation demonstrate that our summaries have better content coverage.

A core step in statistical data-to-text generation concerns learning correspondences between structured data representations (e.g., facts in a database) and associated texts. In this paper we aim to bootstrap generators from large scale datasets where the data (e.g., DBPedia facts) and related texts (e.g., Wikipedia abstracts) are loosely aligned. We tackle this challenging task by introducing a special-purpose content selection mechanism. We use multi-instance learning to automatically discover correspondences between data and text pairs and show how these can be used to enhance the content signal while training an encoder-decoder architecture. Experimental results demonstrate that models trained with content-specific objectives improve upon a vanilla encoder-decoder which solely relies on soft attention.

Most previous work on neural text generation from graph-structured data relies on standard sequence-to-sequence methods. These approaches linearise the input graph to be fed to a recurrent neural network. In this paper, we propose an alternative encoder based on graph convolutional networks that directly exploits the input structure. We report results on two graph-to-sequence datasets that empirically show the benefits of explicitly encoding the input graph structure.

Although there has been much work in recent years on data-driven natural language generation, little attention has been paid to the fine-grained interactions that arise during microplanning between aggregation, surface realization, and sentence segmentation. In this article, we propose a hybrid symbolic/statistical approach to jointly model the constraints regulating these interactions. Our approach integrates a small handwritten grammar, a statistical hypertagger, and a surface realization algorithm. It is applied to the verbalization of knowledge base queries and tested on 13 knowledge bases to demonstrate domain independence. We evaluate our approach in several ways. A quantitative analysis shows that the hybrid approach outperforms a purely symbolic approach in terms of both speed and coverage. Results from a human study indicate that users find the output of this hybrid statistic/symbolic system more fluent than both a template-based and a purely symbolic grammar-based approach. Finally, we illustrate by means of examples that our approach can account for various factors impacting aggregation, sentence segmentation, and surface realization.

The WebNLG challenge consists in mapping sets of RDF triples to text. It provides a common benchmark on which to train, evaluate and compare “microplanners”, i.e. generation systems that verbalise a given content by making a range of complex interacting choices including referring expression generation, aggregation, lexicalisation, surface realisation and sentence segmentation. In this paper, we introduce the microplanning task, describe data preparation, introduce our evaluation methodology, analyse participant results and provide a brief description of the participating systems.

A generation system can only be as good as the data it is trained on. In this short paper, we propose a methodology for analysing data-to-text corpora used for training Natural Language Generation (NLG) systems. We apply this methodology to three existing benchmarks. We conclude by eliciting a set of criteria for the creation of a data-to-text benchmark which could help better support the development, evaluation and comparison of linguistically sophisticated data-to-text generators.

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.

In Natural Language Generation (NLG), one important limitation is the lack of common benchmarks on which to train, evaluate and compare data-to-text generators. In this paper, we make one step in that direction and introduce a method for automatically creating an arbitrary large repertoire of data units that could serve as input for generation. Using both automated metrics and a human evaluation, we show that the data units produced by our method are both diverse and coherent.

There has been much debate, both theoretical and practical, on how to link ontologies and lexicons in natural language processing (NLP) applications. In this paper, we focus on an application in which lexicon and ontology are used to generate teaching material. We briefly describe the application (a serious game for language learning). We then zoom in on the representation and interlinking of the lexicon and of the ontology. We show how the use of existing standards and of good practice principles facilitates the design of our resources while satisfying the expressivity requirements set by natural language generation.