Text generation from a knowledge base aims to translate knowledge triples to natural language descriptions. Most existing methods ignore the faithfulness between a generated text description and the original table, leading to generated information that goes beyond the content of the table. In this paper, for the first time, we propose a novel Transformer-based generation framework to achieve the goal. The core techniques in our method to enforce faithfulness include a new table-text optimal-transport matching loss and a table-text embedding similarity loss based on the Transformer model. Furthermore, to evaluate faithfulness, we propose a new automatic metric specialized to the table-to-text generation problem. We also provide detailed analysis on each component of our model in our experiments. Automatic and human evaluations show that our framework can significantly outperform state-of-the-art by a large margin.

Generating multi-sentence descriptions for videos is one of the most challenging captioning tasks due to its high requirements for not only visual relevance but also discourse-based coherence across the sentences in the paragraph. Towards this goal, we propose a new approach called Memory-Augmented Recurrent Transformer (MART), which uses a memory module to augment the transformer architecture. The memory module generates a highly summarized memory state from the video segments and the sentence history so as to help better prediction of the next sentence (w.r.t. coreference and repetition aspects), thus encouraging coherent paragraph generation. Extensive experiments, human evaluations, and qualitative analyses on two popular datasets ActivityNet Captions and YouCookII show that MART generates more coherent and less repetitive paragraph captions than baseline methods, while maintaining relevance to the input video events.

We present the first human-annotated dialogue-based relation extraction (RE) dataset DialogRE, aiming to support the prediction of relation(s) between two arguments that appear in a dialogue. We further offer DialogRE as a platform for studying cross-sentence RE as most facts span multiple sentences. We argue that speaker-related information plays a critical role in the proposed task, based on an analysis of similarities and differences between dialogue-based and traditional RE tasks. Considering the timeliness of communication in a dialogue, we design a new metric to evaluate the performance of RE methods in a conversational setting and investigate the performance of several representative RE methods on DialogRE. Experimental results demonstrate that a speaker-aware extension on the best-performing model leads to gains in both the standard and conversational evaluation settings. DialogRE is available at https://dataset.org/dialogre/.

Zero pronoun recovery and resolution aim at recovering the dropped pronoun and pointing out its anaphoric mentions, respectively. We propose to better explore their interaction by solving both tasks together, while the previous work treats them separately. For zero pronoun resolution, we study this task in a more realistic setting, where no parsing trees or only automatic trees are available, while most previous work assumes gold trees. Experiments on two benchmarks show that joint modeling significantly outperforms our baseline that already beats the previous state of the arts.

In this paper, we study machine reading comprehension (MRC) on long texts: where a model takes as inputs a lengthy document and a query, extracts a text span from the document as an answer. State-of-the-art models (e.g., BERT) tend to use a stack of transformer layers that are pre-trained from a large number of unlabeled language corpora to encode the joint contextual information of query and document. However, these transformer models can only take as input a fixed-length (e.g., 512) text. To deal with even longer text inputs, previous approaches usually chunk them into equally-spaced segments and predict answers based on each segment independently without considering the information from other segments. As a result, they may form segments that fail to cover complete answers or retain insufficient contexts around the correct answer required for question answering. Moreover, they are less capable of answering questions that need cross-segment information. We propose to let a model learn to chunk in a more flexible way via reinforcement learning: a model can decide the next segment that it wants to process in either direction. We also apply recurrent mechanisms to enable information to flow across segments. Experiments on three MRC tasks – CoQA, QuAC, and TriviaQA – demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed recurrent chunking mechanisms: we can obtain segments that are more likely to contain complete answers and at the same time provide sufficient contexts around the ground truth answers for better predictions.

The task of graph-to-text generation aims at producing sentences that preserve the meaning of input graphs. As a crucial defect, the current state-of-the-art models may mess up or even drop the core structural information of input graphs when generating outputs. We propose to tackle this problem by leveraging richer training signals that can guide our model for preserving input information. In particular, we introduce two types of autoencoding losses, each individually focusing on different aspects (a.k.a. views) of input graphs. The losses are then back-propagated to better calibrate our model via multi-task training. Experiments on two benchmarks for graph-to-text generation show the effectiveness of our approach over a state-of-the-art baseline.