Few-Shot Table-to-Text Generation with Structural Bias Attention

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
PRICAI 2023: Trends in Artificial Intelligence (PRICAI 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 14326))

Included in the following conference series:

  • 685 Accesses

Abstract

Table-to-text generation task refers to converting tabular data into language text to facilitate easier understanding and analysis of the table. Recently, pre-trained models have made significant advancements in this kind of tasks. However, the inherent structural differences between tabular data and text, and the lack of domain-specific knowledge in few-shot datasets, make it challenging for pre-trained models to generate faithful text. To solve these problems, we proposed a framework that encodes tables by obtaining structural bias attention through pruning full self-attention, distinguishing the importance of cells from a structural perspective. We use the pre-trained model with the structural bias framework to the generation component of Prototype-to-Generation. To encourage prototype memory to adhere to the table content and generate more accurate and aligned sentences, we employ Reinforcement Learning. We conducted extensive experiments on three few-shot table datasets. Compared to previous advanced methods, our model achieved superior performance across multiple evaluation metrics.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Subscribe and save

Springer+ Basic
EUR 32.99 /Month
  • Get 10 units per month
  • Download Article/Chapter or Ebook
  • 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
  • Cancel anytime
Subscribe now

Buy Now

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 89.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 119.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free ship** worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Lebret, R., Grangier, D., Auli, M.: Neural text generation from structured data with application to the biography domain. In: Proceedings of the 2016 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. Association for Computational Linguistics (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Hasan, S.A., Farri, O.: Clinical natural language processing with deep learning. Data Sci. Healthcare: Methodol. Appli., 147–171 (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Li, Y., Li, W., Nie, L.: MMCoQA: conversational question answering over text, tables, and images. In: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers),  pp. 4220–4231 (2022)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Liu, T., Wang, K., Sha, L., et al.: Table-to-text generation by structure-aware seq2seq learning. In: Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, vol. 32(1) (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Su, Y., Meng, Z., Baker, S., et al.: Few-shot table-to-text generation with prototype memory. In: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021, pp.  910–917 (2021)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Vaswani, A., Shazeer, N,, Parmar, N., et al.: Attention is all you need. Adv. Neural Inform. Proc. Syst. 30 (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Papineni, K., Roukos, S., Ward, T., et al.: Bleu: a method for automatic evaluation of machine translation. In: Proceedings of the 40th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 311–318 (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Chen Z, Eavani H, Chen W, et al. Few-Shot NLG with Pre-trained language model[C]//Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. 2020: 183–190

    Google Scholar 

  9. Gong, H., Sun, Y., Feng, X., et al.: Tablegpt: few-shot table-to-text generation with table structure reconstruction and content matching.  In: Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pp. 1978–1988 (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Li, X.L., Liang, P.: Prefix-tuning: optimizing continuous prompts for generation. In: Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pp. 4582–4597 (2021)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Zhao, W., Liu, Y., Wan, Y.,  Yu, P.: Attend, memorize and generate: towards faithful table-to-text generation in few shots. In: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, pp. 4106–4117. Association for Computational Linguistics (2021)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Luo, Y., Lu, M., Liu, G., Wang, S.: Few-shot table-to-text generation with prefix-controlled generator. In: Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pp. 6493–6504 (2022)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Raffel, C., Shazeer, N., Roberts, A., et al.: Exploring the limits of transfer learning with a unified text-to-text transformer. J. Mach. Learn. Res. 21(1), 5485–5551 (2020)

    MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  14. Dhingra, B., Faruqui, M., Parikh, A., Chang, M.-W., Das, D., Cohen, W.: Handling divergent reference texts when evaluating table-to-text generation. In: Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 4884–4895 (2019)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

This work is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos.62066033, 61966025); Inner Mongolia Key Research and Development Fund Project (No. 2023YFSW0001); Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region Over-seas Students Innovation and Entrepreneurship Startup Program.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Weihua Wang .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2024 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Liu, D., Wang, W., Bao, F., Gaov, G. (2024). Few-Shot Table-to-Text Generation with Structural Bias Attention. In: Liu, F., Sadanandan, A.A., Pham, D.N., Mursanto, P., Lukose, D. (eds) PRICAI 2023: Trends in Artificial Intelligence. PRICAI 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 14326. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-7022-3_31

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-7022-3_31

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore

  • Print ISBN: 978-981-99-7021-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-981-99-7022-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Navigation