Papers › Table-to-text Generation by Structure-aware Seq2seq Learning

Table-to-text Generation by Structure-aware Seq2seq Learning

27 Nov 2017arXiv:1711.09724archive 2025-07-28

Tianyu Liu, Kexiang Wang, Lei Sha, Baobao Chang, Zhifang Sui

Table-to-text generation aims to generate a description for a factual table which can be viewed as a set of field-value records. To encode both the content and the structure of a table, we propose a novel structure-aware seq2seq architecture which consists of field-gating encoder and description generator with dual attention. In the encoding phase, we update the cell memory of the LSTM unit by a field gate and its corresponding field value in order to incorporate field information into table representation. In the decoding phase, dual attention mechanism which contains word level attention and field level attention is proposed to model the semantic relevance between the generated description and the table. We conduct experiments on the \texttt{WIKIBIO} dataset which contains over 700k biographies and corresponding infoboxes from Wikipedia. The attention visualizations and case studies show that our model is capable of generating coherent and informative descriptions based on the comprehensive understanding of both the content and the structure of a table. Automatic evaluations also show our model outperforms the baselines by a great margin. Code for this work is available on https://github.com/tyliupku/wiki2bio.

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tyliupku/wiki2bio officialmentioned in papertf report
Parth27/Data2Text mentioned on GitHubtf report
anjbapat/D2T mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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Table-to-Text GenerationText Generation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Table-to-Text Generation WikiBio Field-gating Seq2seq + dual attention BLEU 44.89 #1 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Table-to-Text Generation WikiBio Field-gating Seq2seq + dual attention ROUGE 41.21 #1 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Table-to-Text Generation WikiBio Field-gating Seq2seq + dual attention + beam search BLEU 44.71 #2 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Table-to-Text Generation WikiBio Field-gating Seq2seq + dual attention + beam search ROUGE 41.65 #2 of 4 Archive leaderboard report

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