DART: Open-Domain Structured Data Record to Text Generation
This work addresses the costly annotation process for data-to-text generation, particularly for tables, by providing a large-scale dataset that facilitates out-of-domain generalization.
The authors tackled the problem of generating text from structured data records by creating DART, an open-domain dataset with over 82k instances, and achieved new state-of-the-art results on the WebNLG 2017 benchmark.
We present DART, an open domain structured DAta Record to Text generation dataset with over 82k instances (DARTs). Data-to-Text annotations can be a costly process, especially when dealing with tables which are the major source of structured data and contain nontrivial structures. To this end, we propose a procedure of extracting semantic triples from tables that encodes their structures by exploiting the semantic dependencies among table headers and the table title. Our dataset construction framework effectively merged heterogeneous sources from open domain semantic parsing and dialogue-act-based meaning representation tasks by utilizing techniques such as: tree ontology annotation, question-answer pair to declarative sentence conversion, and predicate unification, all with minimum post-editing. We present systematic evaluation on DART as well as new state-of-the-art results on WebNLG 2017 to show that DART (1) poses new challenges to existing data-to-text datasets and (2) facilitates out-of-domain generalization. Our data and code can be found at https://github.com/Yale-LILY/dart.