Ning Dai


2020

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𝒫2: A Plan-and-Pretrain Approach for Knowledge Graph-to-Text Generation
Qipeng Guo | Zhijing Jin | Ning Dai | Xipeng Qiu | Xiangyang Xue | David Wipf | Zheng Zhang
Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Natural Language Generation from the Semantic Web (WebNLG+)

Text verbalization of knowledge graphs is an important problem with wide application to natural language generation (NLG) systems. It is challenging because the generated text not only needs to be grammatically correct (fluency), but also has to contain the given structured knowledge input (relevance) and meet some other criteria. We develop a plan-and-pretrain approach, 𝒫2, which consists of a relational graph convolutional network (RGCN) planner and the pretrained sequence-tosequence (Seq2Seq) model T5. Specifically, the R-GCN planner first generates an order of the knowledge graph triplets, corresponding to the order that they will be mentioned in text, and then T5 produces the surface realization of the given plan. In the WebNLG+ 2020 Challenge, our submission ranked in 1st place on all automatic and human evaluation criteria of the English RDF-to-text generation task.

2019

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Style Transformer: Unpaired Text Style Transfer without Disentangled Latent Representation
Ning Dai | Jianze Liang | Xipeng Qiu | Xuanjing Huang
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Disentangling the content and style in the latent space is prevalent in unpaired text style transfer. However, two major issues exist in most of the current neural models. 1) It is difficult to completely strip the style information from the semantics for a sentence. 2) The recurrent neural network (RNN) based encoder and decoder, mediated by the latent representation, cannot well deal with the issue of the long-term dependency, resulting in poor preservation of non-stylistic semantic content. In this paper, we propose the Style Transformer, which makes no assumption about the latent representation of source sentence and equips the power of attention mechanism in Transformer to achieve better style transfer and better content preservation.