Papers › Attention Is Indeed All You Need: Semantically Attention-Guided Decoding for Data-to-Text NLG

Attention Is Indeed All You Need: Semantically Attention-Guided Decoding for Data-to-Text NLG

15 Sep 2021INLG (ACL) 2021 8arXiv:2109.07043archive 2025-07-28

Juraj Juraska, Marilyn Walker

Ever since neural models were adopted in data-to-text language generation, they have invariably been reliant on extrinsic components to improve their semantic accuracy, because the models normally do not exhibit the ability to generate text that reliably mentions all of the information provided in the input. In this paper, we propose a novel decoding method that extracts interpretable information from encoder-decoder models' cross-attention, and uses it to infer which attributes are mentioned in the generated text, which is subsequently used to rescore beam hypotheses. Using this decoding method with T5 and BART, we show on three datasets its ability to dramatically reduce semantic errors in the generated outputs, while maintaining their state-of-the-art quality.

PaperPDFConference PDFCode

In Syntology View this paper on Syntology: its repositories, every harvested function with whether it ran, its licence and the call to fetch it.

Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

jjuraska/data2text-nlg officialmentioned in paperpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

AllDecoderText Generation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

AdafactorAdamAttentionAttention DropoutBARTBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutGated Linear UnitInverse Square Root ScheduleLayer NormalizationLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionResidual ConnectionSentencePieceSoftmaxT5

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections