Enhanced transformer model for data-to-text generation

Abstract

Neural models have recently shown significant progress on data-to-text generation tasks in which descriptive texts are generated conditioned on database records. In this work, we present a new Transformer-based data-to-text generation model which learns content selection and summary generation in an end-to-end fashion. We introduce two extensions to the baseline transformer model: First, we modify the latent representation of the input, which helps to significantly improve the content correctness of the output summary; Second, we include an additional learning objective that accounts for content selection modelling. In addition, we propose two data augmentation methods that succeed to further improve performance of the resulting generation models. Evaluation experiments show that our final model outperforms current state-of-the-art systems as measured by different metrics: BLEU, content selection precision and content ordering. We made publicly available the transformer extension presented in this paper1