# Attend, Memorize and Generate: Towards Faithful Table-to-Text Generation in Few Shots

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.00732 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00732/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [Don't Stop Pretraining: Adapt Language Models to Domains and Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10964/) (2020)
- [SpanBERT: Improving Pre-training by Representing and Predicting Spans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10529/) (2019)
- [MultiWOZ -- A Large-Scale Multi-Domain Wizard-of-Oz Dataset for Task-Oriented Dialogue Modelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00278/) (2018)
- [Unified Language Model Pre-training for Natural Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03197/) (2019)
- [It's Not Just Size That Matters: Small Language Models Are Also Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07118/) (2020)
- [TAPAS: Weakly Supervised Table Parsing via Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02349/) (2020)
- [TaBERT: Pretraining for Joint Understanding of Textual and Tabular Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08314/) (2020)
- [MASS: Masked Sequence to Sequence Pre-training for Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02450/) (2019)
- [KG-BERT: BERT for Knowledge Graph Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03193/) (2019)
- [K-BERT: Enabling Language Representation with Knowledge Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.07606/) (2019)
- [ERNIE: Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09223/) (2019)
- [The E2E Dataset: New Challenges For End-to-End Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.09254/) (2017)
- [Handling Divergent Reference Texts when Evaluating Table-to-Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01081/) (2019)
- [KG-BART: Knowledge Graph-Augmented BART for Generative Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.12677/) (2020)
- [Text-to-Text Pre-Training for Data-to-Text Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10433/) (2020)
- [Logical Natural Language Generation from Open-Domain Tables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10404/) (2020)
- [Few-shot Natural Language Generation for Task-Oriented Dialog](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12328/) (2020)
- [Learning Neural Templates for Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.10122/) (2018)
- [Table-to-text Generation by Structure-aware Seq2seq Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09724/) (2017)
- [Few-Shot NLG with Pre-Trained Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09521/) (2019)
- [Tracking the World State with Recurrent Entity Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03969/) (2016)
- [Towards Faithful Neural Table-to-Text Generation with Content-Matching Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00969/) (2020)
- [On Training Instance Selection for Few-Shot Neural Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03176/) (2021)
- [CG-BERT: Conditional Text Generation with BERT for Generalized Few-shot Intent Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01881/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Localize, Retrieve and Fuse: A Generalized Framework for Free-Form Question Answering over Tables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11049/) (2023)
- [Few-Shot Table-to-Text Generation with Prefix-Controlled Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10709/) (2022)
- [Few-Shot Table-to-Text Generation with Prompt Planning and Knowledge Memorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04415/) (2023)
- [Adapting Knowledge for Few-shot Table-to-Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12468/) (2023)
- [Named Entity Recognition via Machine Reading Comprehension: A Multi-Task Learning Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11027/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Few-shot table-to-text generation is a task of composing fluent and faithful sentences to convey table content using limited data. Despite many efforts having been made towards generating impressive fluent sentences by fine-tuning powerful pre-trained language models, the faithfulness of generated content still needs to be improved. To this end, this paper proposes a novel approach Attend, Memorize and Generate (called AMG), inspired by the text generation process of humans. In particular, AMG (1) attends over the multi-granularity of context using a novel strategy based on table slot level and traditional token-by-token level attention to exploit both the table structure and natural linguistic information; (2) dynamically memorizes the table slot allocation states; and (3) generates faithful sentences according to both the context and memory allocation states. Comprehensive experiments with human evaluation on three domains (i.e., humans, songs, and books) of the Wiki dataset show that our model can generate higher qualified texts when compared with several state-of-the-art baselines, in both fluency and faithfulness.