Data-to-text Generation (D2T) aims to generate textual natural language statements that can fluently and precisely describe the structured data such as graphs, tables, and meaning representations (MRs) in the form of key-value pairs. It is a typical and crucial task in natural language generation (NLG). Early D2T systems generated texts with the cost of human engineering in designing domain specific rules and templates, and achieved acceptable performance in coherence, fluency, and fidelity. In recent years, the data-driven D2T systems based on deep learning have reached state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in more challenging datasets. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review on existing neural data-to-text generation approaches. We first introduce available D2T resources, including systematically categorized D2T datasets and mainstream evaluation metrics. Next, we survey existing works based on the taxonomy along two axes: neural end-to-end D2T and neural modular D2T. We also discuss the potential applications and the adverse impacts. Finally, we present readers with the challenges faced by neural D2T and outline some potential future directions in this area.

Relation extraction is an important task in the field of natural language processing. Previous works mainly focus on adopting pipeline methods or joint methods to model relation extraction in general scenarios. However, these existing methods face challenges when adapting to complex relation extraction scenarios, such as handling overlapped triplets, multiple triplets, and cross-sentence triplets. In this paper, we revisit the advantages and disadvantages of the aforementioned methods in complex relation extraction. Based on the in-depth analysis, we propose a novel two-stage bidirectional extract-then-evaluate framework namedBeeRe. In the extraction stage, we first obtain the subject set, relation set, and object set. Then, we design subject- and object-oriented triplet extractors to iteratively recurrent obtain candidate triplets, ensuring high recall. In the evaluation stage, we adopt a relation-oriented triplet filter to determine subject-object pairs based on relations in triplets obtained in the first stage, ensuring high precision. We conduct extensive experiments on three public datasets to show thatBeeReachieves state-of-the-art performance in both complex and general relation extraction scenarios. Even when compared to large language models like closed-source/open-source LLMs,BeeRestill has significant performance gains.

Machine reading comprehension (MRC) is an essential task for many question-answering applications. However, existing MRC datasets mainly focus on data with single answer and overlook multiple answers, which are common in the real world. In this paper, we aim to construct an MRC dataset with both data of single answer and multiple answers. To achieve this purpose, we design a novel pipeline method: data collection, data cleaning, question generation and test set annotation. Based on these procedures, we construct a high-quality multi-answer MRC dataset (MA-MRC) with 129K question-answer-context samples. We implement a sequence of baselines and carry out extensive experiments on MA-MRC. According to the experimental results, MA-MRC is a challenging dataset, which can facilitate the future research on the multi-answer MRC task.

In this article, the authors design two metric sets considering Richness and Correctness based on a quasi-formal conceptual representation. They also design a novel metric set on overlapped instances of different KBs to make the metric results comparable. Finally, they use random sampling techniques to reduce human efforts for assessing the correctness. The authors evaluate three large Chinese KBs including DBpedia Chinese, Zhishi.me and SSCO comparatively, and further compare them with English KBs in terms of data set qualities. They also compare different versions of DBpedia and YAGO. The findings in these KBs not only give a detailed report of the current situation of extracted KBs, but also show the effectiveness of their methods in assessing the quality of Web-Scale KBs comparatively.