Revisiting Challenges in Data-to-Text Generation with Fact Grounding

Data-to-text generation models face challenges in ensuring data fidelity by referring to the correct input source. To inspire studies in this area, Wiseman et al. (2017) introduced the RotoWire corpus on generating NBA game summaries from the box- and line-score tables. However, limited attempts have been made in this direction and the challenges remain. We observe a prominent bottleneck in the corpus where only about 60% of the summary contents can be grounded to the boxscore records. Such information deficiency tends to misguide a conditioned language model to produce unconditioned random facts and thus leads to factual hallucinations. In this work, we restore the information balance and revamp this task to focus on fact-grounded data-to-text generation. We introduce a purified and larger-scale dataset, RotoWire-FG (Fact-Grounding), with 50% more data from the year 2017-19 and enriched input tables, hoping to attract more research focuses in this direction. Moreover, we achieve improved data fidelity over the state-of-the-art models by integrating a new form of table reconstruction as an auxiliary task to boost the generation quality.Comment: Best Paper Runner-up at INLG 2019 (12th International Conference on Natural Language Generation

Truth-Valued-Flow Inference (TVFI) and its applications in approximate reasoning

The framework of the theory of Truth-valued-flow Inference (TVFI) is introduced. Even though there are dozens of papers presented on fuzzy reasoning, we think it is still needed to explore a rather unified fuzzy reasoning theory which has the following two features: (1) it is simplified enough to be executed feasibly and easily; and (2) it is well structural and well consistent enough that it can be built into a strict mathematical theory and is consistent with the theory proposed by L.A. Zadeh. TVFI is one of the fuzzy reasoning theories that satisfies the above two features. It presents inference by the form of networks, and naturally views inference as a process of truth values flowing among propositions

Universal Dependencies Parsing for Colloquial Singaporean English

Singlish can be interesting to the ACL community both linguistically as a major creole based on English, and computationally for information extraction and sentiment analysis of regional social media. We investigate dependency parsing of Singlish by constructing a dependency treebank under the Universal Dependencies scheme, and then training a neural network model by integrating English syntactic knowledge into a state-of-the-art parser trained on the Singlish treebank. Results show that English knowledge can lead to 25% relative error reduction, resulting in a parser of 84.47% accuracies. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to use neural stacking to improve cross-lingual dependency parsing on low-resource languages. We make both our annotation and parser available for further research.Comment: Accepted by ACL 201

Look Before You Leap: Bridging Model-Free and Model-Based Reinforcement Learning for Planned-Ahead Vision-and-Language Navigation

Existing research studies on vision and language grounding for robot navigation focus on improving model-free deep reinforcement learning (DRL) models in synthetic environments. However, model-free DRL models do not consider the dynamics in the real-world environments, and they often fail to generalize to new scenes. In this paper, we take a radical approach to bridge the gap between synthetic studies and real-world practices---We propose a novel, planned-ahead hybrid reinforcement learning model that combines model-free and model-based reinforcement learning to solve a real-world vision-language navigation task. Our look-ahead module tightly integrates a look-ahead policy model with an environment model that predicts the next state and the reward. Experimental results suggest that our proposed method significantly outperforms the baselines and achieves the best on the real-world Room-to-Room dataset. Moreover, our scalable method is more generalizable when transferring to unseen environments.Comment: 21 pages, 7 figures, with supplementary materia

Potential novel bZIP-like gene for resistance to Erysiphe necator identified in Chinese wild Vitis pseudoreticulata

In this study, a novel bZIP-like gene was isolated from Chinese wild Vitis pseudoreticulata W. T. acc. Baihe-35-1. The full-length complementary deoxyribonucleic acid (cDNA) sequence of the gene was 1583 bp including 159 bp 5’ untranslated region (UTR), 365 bp 3’ UTR and a 1083 bp ORF which encodes a polypeptide of 360 amino acids with a molecular weight of 38.662 kDa. The deduced amino acid sequence shares an overall 46 to 69.8% sequence similarity with bZIP from other plants. Therefore, we designated this gene as V. pseudoreticulata bZIP (VpbZIP-like). The expression of VpbZIP-like was induced 12 h post inoculation (hpi) by Erysiphe necator, but transiently decreased, then increased in these two genotypes and its expression was lower in highly resistant genotype Baihe-35-1 than in susceptible genotype Hunan-1 at 24, 48 and 72 hpi. We further tested whether the expression was also a response to plant signaling molecules. Results indicate that the susceptible genotype Hunan-1 showed higher expression of VpbZIP-like than the highly resistant genotype Baihe-35-1 after exogenous application of methyl jasmonate (MeJA), salicylic acid (SA) and ethephon (Eth). Moreover, tissue specific expression pattern of VpbZIP-like was analyzed by reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). Results reveal that it was in lower lever in flower than in leaf, stem, tendril and fruit. The CDS of VpbZIP-like was inserted into the prokaryotic expression construct pGEX-4T-1, and then transformed into Escherichia coli BL21-code induced by isopropyl-b-D-thiogalactopyranoside (IPTG) which resulted in the production of a Mr. 64 kDa of GST- VpbZIP-like fusion protein displayed in sodium dodecyl sulfate polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (SDS-PAGE).Key words: Chinese wild Vitis, bZIP, gene expression, signaling molecules, fusion protein expression