Papers › Data-to-text Generation with Variational Sequential Planning

Data-to-text Generation with Variational Sequential Planning

28 Feb 2022arXiv:2202.13756archive 2025-07-28

Ratish Puduppully, Yao Fu, Mirella Lapata

We consider the task of data-to-text generation, which aims to create textual output from non-linguistic input. We focus on generating long-form text, i.e., documents with multiple paragraphs, and propose a neural model enhanced with a planning component responsible for organizing high-level information in a coherent and meaningful way. We infer latent plans sequentially with a structured variational model, while interleaving the steps of planning and generation. Text is generated by conditioning on previous variational decisions and previously generated text. Experiments on two data-to-text benchmarks (RotoWire and MLB) show that our model outperforms strong baselines and is sample efficient in the face of limited training data (e.g., a few hundred instances).

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ratishsp/data2text-seq-plan-py officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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Tasks

Data-to-Text GenerationText Generation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Data-to-Text Generation MLB Dataset SeqPlan BLEU 14.29 #1 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Data-to-Text Generation MLB Dataset (Content Ordering) SeqPlan DLD 22.7 #1 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Data-to-Text Generation MLB Dataset (Content Selection) SeqPlan Precision 43.3 #2 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Data-to-Text Generation MLB Dataset (Content Selection) SeqPlan Recall 53.5 #2 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Data-to-Text Generation MLB Dataset (Relation Generation) SeqPlan Precision 95.9 #1 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Data-to-Text Generation MLB Dataset (Relation Generation) SeqPlan count 28.9 #1 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Data-to-Text Generation RotoWire (Relation Generation) SeqPlan Precision 97.6 #1 of 6 Archive leaderboard report
Data-to-Text Generation RotoWire (Relation Generation) SeqPlan count 46.7 #1 of 6 Archive leaderboard report

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