Shreyan Bakshi


2021

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Structure-to-Text Generation with Self-Training, Acceptability Classifiers and Context-Conditioning for the GEM Shared Task
Shreyan Bakshi | Soumya Batra | Peyman Heidari | Ankit Arun | Shashank Jain | Michael White
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Natural Language Generation, Evaluation, and Metrics (GEM 2021)

We explore the use of self-training and acceptability classifiers with pre-trained models for natural language generation in structure-to-text settings using three GEM datasets (E2E, WebNLG-en, Schema-Guided Dialog). With the Schema-Guided Dialog dataset, we also experiment with including multiple turns of context in the input. We find that self-training with reconstruction matching along with acceptability classifier filtering can improve semantic correctness, though gains are limited in the full-data setting. With context-conditioning, we find that including multiple turns in the context encourages the model to align with the user’s word and phrasing choices as well as to generate more self-consistent responses. In future versions of the GEM challenge, we encourage the inclusion of few-shot tracks to encourage research on data efficiency.