The ApposCorpus: A new multilingual, multi-domain dataset for factual appositive generation
This work addresses the need for automated background information generation in texts like news and Wikipedia to aid diverse audiences, but it is incremental as it builds on prior appositive generation research.
The paper tackles the problem of generating factual appositive noun phrases for named entities in multilingual, multi-domain texts, introducing a new dataset and task definition, and finds that standard methods perform poorly, indicating significant room for improvement.
News articles, image captions, product reviews and many other texts mention people and organizations whose name recognition could vary for different audiences. In such cases, background information about the named entities could be provided in the form of an appositive noun phrase, either written by a human or generated automatically. We expand on the previous work in appositive generation with a new, more realistic, end-to-end definition of the task, instantiated by a dataset that spans four languages (English, Spanish, German and Polish), two entity types (person and organization) and two domains (Wikipedia and News). We carry out an extensive analysis of the data and the task, pointing to the various modeling challenges it poses. The results we obtain with standard language generation methods show that the task is indeed non-trivial, and leaves plenty of room for improvement.