Multilingual Natural Language Generation (NLG) is challenging due to the lack of training data for low-resource languages. However, some low-resource languages have up to tens of millions of speakers globally, making it important to improve NLG tools for them. Table-to-Text NLG is an excellent measure of models' reasoning abilities but is very challenging in the multilingual setting. System outputs are often not attributable, or faithful, to the data in the source table. Intermediate planning techniques like Question-Answer (QA) blueprints have been shown to improve attributability on summarisation tasks. This work explores whether QA blueprints make multilingual Table-to-Text outputs more attributable to the input tables. This paper extends the challenging multilingual Table-to-Text dataset, TaTA, which includes African languages, with QA blueprints. Sequence-to-sequence language models are then finetuned on this dataset, with and without blueprints. Results show that QA blueprints improve performance for models finetuned and evaluated only on English examples, but do not demonstrate gains in the multilingual setting. This is due to inaccuracies in machine translating the blueprints from English into target languages when generating the training data, and models failing to rely closely on the blueprints they generate. An in-depth analysis is conducted on why this is challenging.
Query-focused tabular summarization is an emerging task in table-to-text generation that synthesizes a summary response from tabular data based on user queries. Traditional transformer-based approaches face challenges due to token limitations and the complexity of reasoning over large tables. To address these challenges, we introduce DETQUS (Decomposition-Enhanced Transformers for QUery-focused Summarization), a system designed to improve summarization accuracy by leveraging tabular decomposition alongside a fine-tuned encoder-decoder model. DETQUS employs a large language model to selectively reduce table size, retaining only query-relevant columns while preserving essential information. This strategy enables more efficient processing of large tables and enhances summary quality. Our approach, equipped with table-based QA model Omnitab, achieves a ROUGE-L score of 0.4437, outperforming the previous state-of-the-art REFACTOR model (ROUGE-L: 0.422). These results highlight DETQUS as a scalable and effective solution for query-focused tabular summarization, offering a structured alternative to more complex architectures.
Table processing, a key task in natural language processing, has significantly benefited from recent advancements in language models (LMs). However, the capabilities of LMs in table-to-text generation, which transforms structured data into coherent narrative text, require an in-depth investigation, especially with current open-source models. This study explores the effectiveness of various in-context learning strategies in LMs across benchmark datasets, focusing on the impact of providing examples to the model. More importantly, we examine a real-world use case, offering valuable insights into practical applications. To complement traditional evaluation metrics, we employ a large language model (LLM) self-evaluation approach using chain-of-thought reasoning and assess its correlation with human-aligned metrics like BERTScore. Our findings highlight the significant impact of examples in improving table-to-text generation and suggest that, while LLM self-evaluation has potential, its current alignment with human judgment could be enhanced. This points to the need for more reliable evaluation methods.
Diffusion models have demonstrated significant potential in achieving state-of-the-art performance across various text generation tasks. In this systematic study, we investigate their application to the table-to-text problem by adapting the diffusion model to the task and conducting an in-depth analysis. Our experiments cover multiple aspects of diffusion models training. We explore sampling strategy influence by inducing recent diffusion model accelerator DPM-Solver++ into our core model. We have tested different prediction aggregation methods, like ROVER and Minimum Bayes-Risk (MBR). Our studies cover the impact of the pre-training phase in diffusion models and the generation length constraints influence. We also have compared diffusion model generation with auto-regressive text-to-text models with different temperature settings for diversity evaluation. Our key observation is that diffusion models demonstrate the balance between quality and diversity while auto-regressive text-to-text models are not successful at handling both at the same time. Furthermore, we found out that to achieve the highest quality possible, it is preferable to use a regular sampler with the strictest length constraint to create multiple samples, and then use MBR to aggregate the predictions. However, if you are prepared to give up high level of diversity and to accelerate the process, you can also utilize a fast sampler DPM-Solver++. Our findings reveal that diffusion models achieve comparable results in the table-to-text domain, highlighting their viability in the table-to-text challenge as a promising research direction.
Table-to-text generation, a long-standing challenge in natural language generation, has remained unexplored through the lens of subjectivity. Subjectivity here encompasses the comprehension of information derived from the table that cannot be described solely by objective data. Given the absence of pre-existing datasets, we introduce the Ta2TS dataset with 3849 data instances. We perform the task of fine-tuning sequence-to-sequence models on the linearized tables and prompting on popular large language models. We analyze the results from a quantitative and qualitative perspective to ensure the capture of subjectivity and factual consistency. The analysis shows the fine-tuned LMs can perform close to the prompted LLMs. Both the models can capture the tabular data, generating texts with 85.15% BERTScore and 26.28% Meteor score. To the best of our knowledge, we provide the first-of-its-kind dataset on tables with multiple genres and subjectivity included and present the first comprehensive analysis and comparison of different LLM performances on this task.
Augmenting Large Language Models (LLMs) for Question Answering (QA) with domain specific data has attracted wide attention. However, domain data often exists in a hybrid format, including text and semi-structured tables, posing challenges for the seamless integration of information. Table-to-Text Generation is a promising solution by facilitating the transformation of hybrid data into a uniformly text-formatted corpus. Although this technique has been widely studied by the NLP community, there is currently no comparative analysis on how corpora generated by different table-to-text methods affect the performance of QA systems. In this paper, we address this research gap in two steps. First, we innovatively integrate table-to-text generation into the framework of enhancing LLM-based QA systems with domain hybrid data. Then, we utilize this framework in real-world industrial data to conduct extensive experiments on two types of QA systems (DSFT and RAG frameworks) with four representative methods: Markdown format, Template serialization, TPLM-based method, and LLM-based method. Based on the experimental results, we draw some empirical findings and explore the underlying reasons behind the success of some methods. We hope the findings of this work will provide a valuable reference for the academic and industrial communities in developing robust QA systems.
The sheer volume of scientific experimental results and complex technical statements, often presented in tabular formats, presents a formidable barrier to individuals acquiring preferred information. The realms of scientific reasoning and content generation that adhere to user preferences encounter distinct challenges. In this work, we present a new task for generating fluent and logical descriptions that match user preferences over scientific tabular data, aiming to automate scientific document analysis. To facilitate research in this direction, we construct a new challenging dataset CTRLSciTab consisting of table-description pairs extracted from the scientific literature, with highlighted cells and corresponding domain-specific knowledge base. We evaluated popular pre-trained language models to establish a baseline and proposed a novel architecture outperforming competing approaches. The results showed that large models struggle to produce accurate content that aligns with user preferences. As the first of its kind, our work should motivate further research in scientific domains.
Table-to-text generation involves generating appropriate textual descriptions given structured tabular data. It has attracted increasing attention in recent years thanks to the popularity of neural network models and the availability of large-scale datasets. A common feature across existing methods is their treatment of the input as a string, i.e., by employing linearization techniques that do not always preserve information in the table, are verbose, and lack space efficiency. We propose to rethink data-to-text generation as a visual recognition task, removing the need for rendering the input in a string format. We present PixT3, a multimodal table-to-text model that overcomes the challenges of linearization and input size limitations encountered by existing models. PixT3 is trained with a new self-supervised learning objective to reinforce table structure awareness and is applicable to open-ended and controlled generation settings. Experiments on the ToTTo and Logic2Text benchmarks show that PixT3 is competitive and, in some settings, superior to generators that operate solely on text.
Large models have demonstrated significant progress across various domains, particularly in tasks related to text generation. In the domain of Table to Text, many Large Language Model (LLM)-based methods currently resort to modifying prompts to invoke public APIs, incurring potential costs and information leaks. With the advent of open-source large models, fine-tuning LLMs has become feasible. In this study, we conducted parameter-efficient fine-tuning on the LLaMA2 model. Distinguishing itself from previous fine-tuning-based table-to-text methods, our approach involves injecting reasoning information into the input by emphasizing table-specific row data. Our model consists of two modules: 1) a table reasoner that identifies relevant row evidence, and 2) a table summarizer that generates sentences based on the highlighted table. To facilitate this, we propose a search strategy to construct reasoning labels for training the table reasoner. On both the FetaQA and QTSumm datasets, our approach achieved state-of-the-art results. Additionally, we observed that highlighting input tables significantly enhances the model's performance and provides valuable interpretability.
Table-to-text systems generate natural language statements from structured data like tables. While end-to-end techniques suffer from low factual correctness (fidelity), a previous study reported gains when using manual logical forms (LF) that represent the selected content and the semantics of the target text. Given the manual step, it was not clear whether automatic LFs would be effective, or whether the improvement came from content selection alone. We present TlT which, given a table and a selection of the content, first produces LFs and then the textual statement. We show for the first time that automatic LFs improve quality, with an increase in fidelity of 30 points over a comparable system not using LFs. Our experiments allow to quantify the remaining challenges for high factual correctness, with automatic selection of content coming first, followed by better Logic-to-Text generation and, to a lesser extent, better Table-to-Logic parsing.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across a wide range of natural language processing tasks. However, their enormous parameter size and extremely high requirements for compute power pose challenges for their practical deployment. Recent research has revealed that specific capabilities of LLMs, such as numerical reasoning, can be transferred to smaller models through distillation. Some studies explore the potential of leveraging LLMs to perform table-based reasoning. However, there has been no prior work focusing on table reasoning skills in smaller models specifically tailored for scientific table-to-text generation tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel table-based reasoning distillation approach, with the aim of distilling LLMs into tailored smaller models. Our experimental results have shown that a 220 million parameter model (Flan-T5-base) fine-tuned using distilled data, not only achieves a significant improvement compared to traditionally fine-tuned baselines, but also surpasses specific LLMs on a scientific table-to-text generation dataset. Our code is available at https://github.com/Bernard-Yang/DistillTableCoT.
Hallucinations in text generation occur when the system produces text that is not grounded in the input. In this work, we tackle the problem of hallucinations in neural chart summarization. Our analysis shows that the target side of chart summarization training datasets often contains additional information, leading to hallucinations. We propose a natural language inference (NLI) based method to preprocess the training data and show through human evaluation that our method significantly reduces hallucinations. We also found that shortening long-distance dependencies in the input sequence and adding chart-related information like title and legends improves the overall performance.
Tabular data is prevalent across various industries, necessitating significant time and effort for users to understand and manipulate for their information-seeking purposes. The advancements in large language models (LLMs) have shown enormous potential to improve user efficiency. However, the adoption of LLMs in real-world applications for table information seeking remains underexplored. In this paper, we investigate the table-to-text capabilities of different LLMs using four datasets within two real-world information seeking scenarios. These include the LogicNLG and our newly-constructed LoTNLG datasets for data insight generation, along with the FeTaQA and our newly-constructed F2WTQ datasets for query-based generation. We structure our investigation around three research questions, evaluating the performance of LLMs in table-to-text generation, automated evaluation, and feedback generation, respectively. Experimental results indicate that the current high-performing LLM, specifically GPT-4, can effectively serve as a table-to-text generator, evaluator, and feedback generator, facilitating users' information seeking purposes in real-world scenarios. However, a significant performance gap still exists between other open-sourced LLMs (e.g., Tulu and LLaMA-2) and GPT-4 models. Our data and code are publicly available at https://github.com/yale-nlp/LLM-T2T.
People primarily consult tables to conduct data analysis or answer specific questions. Text generation systems that can provide accurate table summaries tailored to users' information needs can facilitate more efficient access to relevant data insights. Motivated by this, we define a new query-focused table summarization task, where text generation models have to perform human-like reasoning and analysis over the given table to generate a tailored summary. We introduce a new benchmark named QTSumm for this task, which contains 7,111 human-annotated query-summary pairs over 2,934 tables covering diverse topics. We investigate a set of strong baselines on QTSumm, including text generation, table-to-text generation, and large language models. Experimental results and manual analysis reveal that the new task presents significant challenges in table-to-text generation for future research. Moreover, we propose a new approach named ReFactor, to retrieve and reason over query-relevant information from tabular data to generate several natural language facts. Experimental results demonstrate that ReFactor can bring improvements to baselines by concatenating the generated facts to the model input. Our data and code are publicly available at https://github.com/yale-nlp/QTSumm.
The task of table summarization involves generating text that both succinctly and accurately represents the table or a specific set of highlighted cells within a table. While significant progress has been made in table to text generation techniques, models still mostly generate descriptive summaries, which reiterates the information contained within the table in sentences. Through analysis of popular table to text benchmarks (ToTTo (Parikh et al., 2020 and InfoTabs (Gupta et al., 2020) we observe that in order to generate the ideal summary, multiple types of reasoning is needed coupled with access to knowledge beyond the scope of the table. To address this gap, we propose ReTAG, a table and reasoning aware model that uses vector-quantization to infuse different types of analytical reasoning into the output. ReTAG achieves 2.2%, 2.9% improvement on the PARENT metric in the relevant slice of ToTTo and InfoTabs for the table to text generation task over state of the art baselines. Through human evaluation, we observe that output from ReTAG is upto 12% more faithful and analytical compared to a strong table-aware model. To the best of our knowledge, ReTAG is the first model that can controllably use multiple reasoning methods within a structure-aware sequence to sequence model to surpass state of the art performance in multiple table to text tasks. We extend (and open source 35.6K analytical, 55.9k descriptive instances) the ToTTo, InfoTabs datasets with the reasoning categories used in each reference sentences.
Existing neural methods have shown great potentials towards generating informative text from structured tabular data as well as maintaining high content fidelity. However, few of them shed light on generating personalized expressions, which often requires well-aligned persona-table-text datasets that are difficult to obtain. To overcome these obstacles, we explore personalized table-to-text generation under a zero-shot setting, by assuming no well-aligned persona-table-text triples are required during training. To this end, we firstly collect a set of unpaired persona information and then propose a semi-supervised approach with contrastive persona distillation (S2P-CPD) to generate personalized context. Specifically, tabular data and persona information are firstly represented as latent variables separately. Then, we devise a latent space fusion technique to distill persona information into the table representation. Besides, a contrastive-based discriminator is employed to guarantee the style consistency between the generated context and its corresponding persona. Experimental results on two benchmarks demonstrate S2P-CPD's ability on keeping both content fidelity and personalized expressions.
Heterogenity of data-to-text generation datasets limits the research on data-to-text generation systems. We present TabGenie - a toolkit which enables researchers to explore, preprocess, and analyze a variety of data-to-text generation datasets through the unified framework of table-to-text generation. In TabGenie, all the inputs are represented as tables with associated metadata. The tables can be explored through the web interface, which also provides an interactive mode for debugging table-to-text generation, facilitates side-by-side comparison of generated system outputs, and allows easy exports for manual analysis. Furthermore, TabGenie is equipped with command line processing tools and Python bindings for unified dataset loading and processing. We release TabGenie as a PyPI package and provide its open-source code and a live demo at https://github.com/kasnerz/tabgenie.
Pretrained language models (PLMs) have made remarkable progress in table-to-text generation tasks. However, the lack of domain-specific knowledge makes it challenging to bridge the topological gap between tabular data and text, especially in real-world applications with limited resources. To mitigate the limitation of insufficient labeled data, we propose a novel framework: Adapt-Knowledge-to-Generate (AKG). The core insight of AKG is to adapt unlabeled domain-specific knowledge into the model, which brings at least three benefits: (1) it injects representation of normal table-related descriptions to bridge the topological gap between tabular data and texts; (2) it enables us to use large amounts of unlabeled domain-specific knowledge fully, which can alleviate the PLMs' inherent shortcomings of lacking domain knowledge; (3) it allows us to design various tasks to employ the domain-specific knowledge. Extensive experiments and analyses are conducted on three open-domain, few-shot natural language generation (NLG) data sets: Humans, Songs, and Books. Compared to previous state-of-the-art approaches, our model achieves superior performance in terms of both fluency and accuracy as judged by human and automatic evaluations.
In this work we study user controlled table-to-text generation where users explore the content in a table by selecting cells and reading a natural language description thereof automatically produce by a natural language generator. Such generation models usually learn from carefully selected cell combinations (clean cell selections); however, in practice users may select unexpected, redundant, or incoherent cell combinations (noisy cell selections). In experiments, we find that models perform well on test sets coming from the same distribution as the train data but their performance drops when evaluated on realistic noisy user inputs. We propose a fine-tuning regime with additional user-simulated noisy cell selections. Models fine-tuned with the proposed regime gain 4.85 BLEU points on user noisy test cases and 1.4 on clean test cases; and achieve comparable state-of-the-art performance on the ToTTo dataset.
Table-to-text generation aims at automatically generating text to help people conveniently obtain salient information in tables. Recent works explicitly decompose the generation process into content planning and surface generation stages, employing two autoregressive networks for them respectively. However, they are computationally expensive due to the non-parallelizable nature of autoregressive decoding and the redundant parameters of two networks. In this paper, we propose the first totally non-autoregressive table-to-text model (Plan-then-Seam, PTS) that produces its outputs in parallel with one single network. PTS firstly writes and calibrates one plan of the content to be generated with a novel rethinking pointer predictor, and then takes the plan as the context for seaming to decode the description. These two steps share parameters and perform iteratively to capture token inter-dependency while keeping parallel decoding. Experiments on two public benchmarks show that PTS achieves 3.0~5.6 times speedup for inference time, reducing 50% parameters, while maintaining as least comparable performance against strong two-stage table-to-text competitors.