# ASDOT: Any-Shot Data-to-Text Generation with Pretrained Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.04325 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04325/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Oct 2022.

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

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [A Call for Clarity in Reporting BLEU Scores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08771/) (2018)
- [BLEURT: Learning Robust Metrics for Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04696/) (2020)
- [Seq2SQL: Generating Structured Queries from Natural Language using Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.00103/) (2017)
- [Compositional Semantic Parsing on Semi-Structured Tables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.00305/) (2015)
- [The E2E Dataset: New Challenges For End-to-End Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.09254/) (2017)
- [Challenges in Data-to-Document Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.08052/) (2017)
- [DART: Open-Domain Structured Data Record to Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02871/) (2020)
- [Semantically Conditioned LSTM-based Natural Language Generation for Spoken Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.01745/) (2015)
- [Text Generation from Knowledge Graphs with Graph Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02342/) (2019)
- [Handling Divergent Reference Texts when Evaluating Table-to-Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01081/) (2019)
- [Investigating Pretrained Language Models for Graph-to-Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08426/) (2020)
- [Data-to-Text Generation with Content Selection and Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00582/) (2018)
- [Text-to-Text Pre-Training for Data-to-Text Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10433/) (2020)
- [Step-by-Step: Separating Planning from Realization in Neural Data-to-Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03396/) (2019)
- [Few-Shot NLG with Pre-Trained Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09521/) (2019)
- [Neural data-to-text generation: A comparison between pipeline and end-to-end architectures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09022/) (2019)
- [Data-to-text Generation with Entity Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03221/) (2019)
- [Learning To Split and Rephrase From Wikipedia Edit History](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09468/) (2018)
- [Have Your Text and Use It Too! End-to-End Neural Data-to-Text Generation with Semantic Fidelity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06577/) (2020)
- [DiscoFuse: A Large-Scale Dataset for Discourse-Based Sentence Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10526/) (2019)
- [Few-shot Knowledge Graph-to-Text Generation with Pretrained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01623/) (2021)
- [Few-Shot Table-to-Text Generation with Prototype Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12516/) (2021)
- [Improving Compositional Generalization with Self-Training for Data-to-Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08467/) (2021)
- [Neural Pipeline for Zero-Shot Data-to-Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16279/) (2022)
- [Describing a Knowledge Base](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01797/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Language Models Meet World Models: Embodied Experiences Enhance Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10626/) (2023)
- [SynthDST: Synthetic Data is All You Need for Few-Shot Dialog State Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02285/) (2024)
- [Controlling Personality Style in Dialogue with Zero-Shot Prompt-Based Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03848/) (2023)
- [Saliency Map Verbalization: Comparing Feature Importance Representations from Model-free and Instruction-based Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07222/) (2022)
- [An Investigation of LLMs' Inefficacy in Understanding Converse Relations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05163/) (2023)
- [MURMUR: Modular Multi-Step Reasoning for Semi-Structured Data-to-Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08607/) (2022)
- [Faithful Low-Resource Data-to-Text Generation through Cycle Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14793/) (2023)
- [Mind the Labels: Describing Relations in Knowledge Graphs With Pretrained Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07373/) (2022)
- [Can Vision-Language Models Replace Human Annotators: A Case Study with CelebA Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.09416/) (2024)
- [Narrating Causal Graphs with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07118/) (2024)
- [Ontology-Free General-Domain Knowledge Graph-to-Text Generation Dataset Synthesis using Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07088/) (2024)
- [ASPIRO: Any-shot Structured Parsing-error-Induced ReprOmpting for Consistent Data-to-Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17877/) (2023)
- [JaccDiv: A Metric and Benchmark for Quantifying Diversity of Generated Marketing Text in the Music Industry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.20849/) (2025)
- [Cross-Domain, Multi-Task Data-to-Text Generation without In-Domain Training Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.23391/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Data-to-text generation is challenging due to the great variety of the input data in terms of domains (e.g., finance vs sports) or schemata (e.g., diverse predicates). Recent end-to-end neural methods thus require substantial training examples to learn to disambiguate and describe the data. Yet, real-world data-to-text problems often suffer from various data-scarce issues: one may have access to only a handful of or no training examples, and/or have to rely on examples in a different domain or schema. To fill this gap, we propose Any-Shot Data-to-Text (ASDOT), a new approach flexibly applicable to diverse settings by making efficient use of any given (or no) examples. ASDOT consists of two steps, data disambiguation and sentence fusion, both of which are amenable to be solved with off-the-shelf pretrained language models (LMs) with optional finetuning. In the data disambiguation stage, we employ the prompted GPT-3 model to understand possibly ambiguous triples from the input data and convert each into a short sentence with reduced ambiguity. The sentence fusion stage then uses an LM like T5 to fuse all the resulting sentences into a coherent paragraph as the final description. We evaluate extensively on various datasets in different scenarios, including the zero-/few-/full-shot settings, and generalization to unseen predicates and out-of-domain data. Experimental results show that ASDOT consistently achieves significant improvement over baselines, e.g., a 30.81 BLEU gain on the DART dataset under the zero-shot setting.