Neural end-to-end surface realizers output more fluent texts than classical architectures. However, they tend to suffer from adequacy problems, in particular hallucinations in numerical referring expression generation. This poses a problem to language generation in sensitive domains, as is the case of robot journalism covering COVID-19 and Amazon deforestation. We propose an approach whereby numerical referring expressions are converted from digits to plain word form descriptions prior to being fed to state-of-the-art Large Language Models. We conduct automatic and human evaluations to report the best strategy to numerical superficial realization. Code and data are publicly available.

While Natural Language Processing (NLP) models have gained substantial attention, only in recent years has research opened new paths for tackling Human-Computer Design (HCD) from the perspective of natural language. We focus on developing a human-centered corpus, more specifically, a persona-based corpus in a particular healthcare domain (diabetes mellitus self-care). In order to follow an HCD approach, we created personas to model interpersonal interaction (expert and non-expert users) in that specific domain. We show that an HCD approach benefits language generation from different perspectives, from machines to humans - contributing with new directions for low-resource contexts (languages other than English and sensitive domains) where the need to promote effective communication is essential.

This study describes the development of a Portuguese Community-Question Answering benchmark in the domain of Diabetes Mellitus using a Recognizing Question Entailment (RQE) approach. Given a premise question, RQE aims to retrieve semantically similar, already answered, archived questions. We build a new Portuguese benchmark corpus with 785 pairs between premise questions and archived answered questions marked with relevance judgments by medical experts. Based on the benchmark corpus, we leveraged and evaluated several RQE approaches ranging from traditional information retrieval methods to novel large pre-trained language models and ensemble techniques using learn-to-rank approaches. Our experimental results show that a supervised transformer-based method trained with multiple languages and for multiple tasks (MUSE) outperforms the alternatives. Our results also show that ensembles of methods (stacking) as well as a traditional (light) information retrieval method (BM25) can produce competitive results. Finally, among the tested strategies, those that exploit only the question (not the answer), provide the best effectiveness-efficiency trade-off. Code is publicly available.

Data-to-text Natural Language Generation (NLG) is the computational process of generating natural language in the form of text or voice from non-linguistic data. A core micro-planning task within NLG is referring expression generation (REG), which aims to automatically generate noun phrases to refer to entities mentioned as discourse unfolds. A limitation of novel REG models is not being able to generate referring expressions to entities not encountered during the training process. To solve this problem, we propose two extensions to NeuralREG, a state-of-the-art encoder-decoder REG model. The first is a copy mechanism, whereas the second consists of representing the gender and type of the referent as inputs to the model. Drawing on the results of automatic and human evaluation as well as an ablation study using the WebNLG corpus, we contend that our proposal contributes to the generation of more meaningful referring expressions to unseen entities than the original system and related work. Code and all produced data are publicly available.

This demo paper introduces DaMata, a robot-journalist covering deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. The robot-journalist is based on a pipeline architecture of Natural Language Generation, which yields multilingual daily and monthly reports based on the public data provided by DETER, a real-time deforestation satellite monitor developed and maintained by the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research (INPE). DaMata automatically generates reports in Brazilian Portuguese and English and publishes them on the Twitter platform. Corpus and code are publicly available.