Papers › Neural data-to-text generation: A comparison between pipeline and end-to-end architectures
Neural data-to-text generation: A comparison between pipeline and end-to-end architectures
Thiago Castro Ferreira, Chris van der Lee, Emiel van Miltenburg, Emiel Krahmer
Traditionally, most data-to-text applications have been designed using a modular pipeline architecture, in which non-linguistic input data is converted into natural language through several intermediate transformations. In contrast, recent neural models for data-to-text generation have been proposed as end-to-end approaches, where the non-linguistic input is rendered in natural language with much less explicit intermediate representations in-between. This study introduces a systematic comparison between neural pipeline and end-to-end data-to-text approaches for the generation of text from RDF triples. Both architectures were implemented making use of state-of-the art deep learning methods as the encoder-decoder Gated-Recurrent Units (GRU) and Transformer. Automatic and human evaluations together with a qualitative analysis suggest that having explicit intermediate steps in the generation process results in better texts than the ones generated by end-to-end approaches. Moreover, the pipeline models generalize better to unseen inputs. Data and code are publicly available.
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Code
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Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Data-to-Text Generation | WebNLG | E2E GRU | BLEU | 57.20 | #17 of 20 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Data-to-Text Generation | WebNLG Full | Transformer (Pipeline) | BLEU | 51.68 | #8 of 8 | 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.
Methods
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