Papers › Handling Rare Items in Data-to-Text Generation

Handling Rare Items in Data-to-Text Generation

1 Nov 2018WS 2018 11archive 2025-07-28

Anastasia Shimorina, Claire Gardent

Neural approaches to data-to-text generation generally handle rare input items using either delexicalisation or a copy mechanism. We investigate the relative impact of these two methods on two datasets (E2E and WebNLG) and using two evaluation settings. We show (i) that rare items strongly impact performance; (ii) that combining delexicalisation and copying yields the strongest improvement; (iii) that copying underperforms for rare and unseen items and (iv) that the impact of these two mechanisms greatly varies depending on how the dataset is constructed and on how it is split into train, dev and test.

PaperPDFCode

Code

gitlab.com/shimorina/inlg-2018 officialmentioned in paper report
gitlab.com/shimorina/webnlg-dataset officialmentioned in papertf 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

Data-to-Text GenerationKG-to-Text GenerationText Generation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
KG-to-Text Generation WebNLG 2.0 (Constrained) SOTA-NPT BLEU 48.0 #9 of 9 Archive leaderboard report
KG-to-Text Generation WebNLG 2.0 (Constrained) SOTA-NPT METEOR 36.0 #9 of 9 Archive leaderboard report
KG-to-Text Generation WebNLG 2.0 (Constrained) SOTA-NPT ROUGE 65.0 #9 of 9 Archive leaderboard report
KG-to-Text Generation WebNLG 2.0 (Unconstrained) SOTA-NPT BLEU 61 #11 of 13 Archive leaderboard report
KG-to-Text Generation WebNLG 2.0 (Unconstrained) SOTA-NPT METEOR 42 #11 of 13 Archive leaderboard report
KG-to-Text Generation WebNLG 2.0 (Unconstrained) SOTA-NPT ROUGE 71.0 #11 of 13 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

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