Clément Rebuffel Quant Researcher at G-Research

QuestEval is a reference-less metric used in text-to-text tasks, that compares the generated summaries directly to the source text, by automatically asking and answering questions. Its adaptation to Data-to-Text tasks is not straightforward as it requires multimodal Question Generation and Answering systems on the considered tasks, which are seldom available. To this purpose, we propose a method to build synthetic multimodal corpora enabling to train multimodal components for a data-QuestEval metric.

Data-to-Text Generation (DTG) is a subfield of Natural Language Generation aiming at transcribing structured data in natural language descriptions. The field has been recently boosted by the use of neural-based generators which exhibit on one side great syntactic skills without the need of hand-crafted pipelines; on the other side, the quality of the generated text reflects the quality of the training data, which in realistic settings only offer imperfectly aligned structure-text pairs.

In language generation models conditioned by structured data, the classical training via maximum likelihood almost always leads models to pick up on dataset divergence (i.e., hallucinations or omissions), and to incorporate them erroneously in their own generations at inference. In this work, we build ontop of previous Reinforcement Learning based approaches and show that a model-agnostic framework relying on the recently introduced PARENT metric is efficient at reducing both hallucinations and omissions.

Transcribing structured data into natural language descriptions has emerged as a challenging task, referred to as “data-to-text”. These structures generally regroup multiple elements, as well as their attributes. Most attempts rely on translation encoder-decoder methods which linearize elements into a sequence. This however loses most of the structure contained in the data. In this work, we propose to overpass this limitation with a hierarchical model that encodes the data-structure at the element-level and the structure level.