TableGPT: Few-shot Table-to-Text Generation with Table Structure Reconstruction and Content Matching

Heng Gong, Yawei Sun, Xiaocheng Feng, Bing Qin, Wei Bi, Xiaojiang Liu, Ting Liu


Abstract
Although neural table-to-text models have achieved remarkable progress with the help of large-scale datasets, they suffer insufficient learning problem with limited training data. Recently, pre-trained language models show potential in few-shot learning with linguistic knowledge learnt from pretraining on large-scale corpus. However, benefiting table-to-text generation in few-shot setting with the powerful pretrained language model faces three challenges, including (1) the gap between the task’s structured input and the natural language input for pretraining language model. (2) The lack of modeling for table structure and (3) improving text fidelity with less incorrect expressions that are contradicting to the table. To address aforementioned problems, we propose TableGPT for table-to-text generation. At first, we utilize table transformation module with template to rewrite structured table in natural language as input for GPT-2. In addition, we exploit multi-task learning with two auxiliary tasks that preserve table’s structural information by reconstructing the structure from GPT-2’s representation and improving the text’s fidelity with content matching task aligning the table and information in the generated text. By experimenting on Humans, Songs and Books, three few-shot table-to-text datasets in different domains, our model outperforms existing systems on most few-shot settings.
Anthology ID:
2020.coling-main.179
Volume:
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Barcelona, Spain (Online)
Editors:
Donia Scott, Nuria Bel, Chengqing Zong
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
International Committee on Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1978–1988
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.179
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.coling-main.179
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Heng Gong, Yawei Sun, Xiaocheng Feng, Bing Qin, Wei Bi, Xiaojiang Liu, and Ting Liu. 2020. TableGPT: Few-shot Table-to-Text Generation with Table Structure Reconstruction and Content Matching. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 1978–1988, Barcelona, Spain (Online). International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
TableGPT: Few-shot Table-to-Text Generation with Table Structure Reconstruction and Content Matching (Gong et al., COLING 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.179.pdf
Code
 syw1996/TableGPT