Existing data-to-text generation efforts mainly focus on generating a coherent text from non-linguistic input data, such as tables and attribute–value pairs, but overlook that different application scenarios may require texts of different styles. Inspired by this, we define a new task, namely stylized data-to-text generation, whose aim is to generate coherent text for the given non-linguistic data according to a specific style. This task is non-trivial, due to three challenges: the logic of the generated text, unstructured style reference and biased training samples. To address these challenges, we propose a novel stylized data-to-text generation model, named StyleD2T, comprising three components: logic planning-enhanced data embedding, mask-based style embedding, and unbiased stylized text generation. In the first component, we introduce a graph-guided logic planner for attribute organization to ensure the logic of generated text. In the second component, we devise feature-level mask-based style embedding to extract the essential style signal from the given unstructured style reference. In the last one, pseudo triplet augmentation is utilized to achieve unbiased text generation, and a multi-condition based confidence assignment function is designed to ensure the quality of pseudo samples. Extensive experiments on a newly collected dataset from Taobao 1 have been conducted, and the results show the superiority of our model over existing methods.

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.

Existing data-driven methods can well handle short text generation. However, when applied to the long-text generation scenarios such as story generation or advertising text generation in the commercial scenario, these methods may generate illogical and uncontrollable texts. To address these aforementioned issues, we propose a graph-based grouping planner~(GGP) following the idea of first-plan-then-generate. Specifically, given a collection of key phrases, GGP firstly encodes these phrases into a instance-level sequential representation and a corpus-level graph-based representation separately. With these two synergic representations, we then regroup these phrases into a fine-grained plan, based on which we generate the final long text. We conduct our experiments on three long text generation datasets and the experimental results reveal that GGP significantly outperforms baselines, which proves that GGP can control the long text generation with knowing how to say and in what order.

We present AliMe Avatar, a Vtuber designed for live-streaming sales in the E-commerce field. To support the emerging live shopping mode, the core of our digitial avatar is to enable customers to understand products and encourage customers to purchase in a virtual broadcasting room. Based on computer graphics & vision, natural language processing, and speech recognition & synthesis, our AI avatar is able to offer three kinds of key capabilities: custom appearance, product broadcasting, and multi-modal interaction. Currently, it has been launched online in the Taobao app, broadcasts 700+ hours and serves hundreds of thousands of customers per day. In this paper, we mainly focus on the product broadcasting part, demonstrate the system, present the underlying techniques, and share our experience in dealing with live-streaming E-commerce.

In machine reading comprehension (MRC) tasks, sentence inference is an important but extremely difficult problem. Most of MRC models directly interact articles with questions from the word level, which ignores inter and intra information of sentences and cannot well focus on problems about sentence reasoning and inference, especially when the answer clues are far apart in the article. In this paper, we propose an option gate approach for reading comprehension. We consider applying a sentence-level option gate module to make the model incorporate sentence information. In our approach we (1) extract key sentences in the article to filter out noise unrelated to the question and the options, (2) encode each sentence in articles, questions and options with dot-product self-attention to obtain intra sentence representations, (3) model inter relationships between the article and the question with bilinear attention and (4) apply an option gate with sentence inference information to each option representation with the question-aware article representation. This module can help better reasoning instead of directly word matching or paraphrasing. And this module can easily supply sentence information for most of the existing reading comprehension models. Experimental results on the RACE dataset show that this easy and simple module helps outperform the baseline models by 2.5% at most (single model), and achieve state-of-the-art results on the RACE-H dataset.