# Controlling Topic-Focus Articulation in Meaning-to-Text Generation using Graph Neural Networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.02053 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02053/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Deeper Insights into Graph Convolutional Networks for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07606/) (2018)
- [Gated Graph Sequence Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.05493/) (2015)
- [OpenNMT: Open-source Toolkit for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.03815/) (2017)
- [Incorporating Copying Mechanism in Sequence-to-Sequence Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06393/) (2016)
- [Encoding Sentences with Graph Convolutional Networks for Semantic Role Labeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04826/) (2017)
- [Graph Transformer for Graph-to-Sequence Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07470/) (2019)
- [Graph-to-Sequence Learning using Gated Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.09835/) (2018)
- [Neural AMR: Sequence-to-Sequence Models for Parsing and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.08381/) (2017)
- [Pointing the Unknown Words](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08148/) (2016)
- [The Parallel Meaning Bank: Towards a Multilingual Corpus of Translations Annotated with Compositional Meaning Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.03964/) (2017)
- [Modeling Global and Local Node Contexts for Text Generation from Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.11003/) (2020)
- [Densely Connected Graph Convolutional Networks for Graph-to-Sequence Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05957/) (2019)
- [Enhancing AMR-to-Text Generation with Dual Graph Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00352/) (2019)
- [Structural Information Preserving for Graph-to-Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06749/) (2021)
- [Structural Neural Encoders for AMR-to-text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11410/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

A bare meaning representation can be expressed in various ways using natural language, depending on how the information is structured on the surface level. We are interested in finding ways to control topic-focus articulation when generating text from meaning. We focus on distinguishing active and passive voice for sentences with transitive verbs. The idea is to add pragmatic information such as topic to the meaning representation, thereby forcing either active or passive voice when given to a natural language generation system. We use graph neural models because there is no explicit information about word order in a meaning represented by a graph. We try three different methods for topic-focus articulation (TFA) employing graph neural models for a meaning-to-text generation task. We propose a novel encoding strategy about node aggregation in graph neural models, which instead of traditional encoding by aggregating adjacent node information, learns node representations by using depth-first search. The results show our approach can get competitive performance with state-of-art graph models on general text generation, and lead to significant improvements on the task of active-passive conversion compared to traditional adjacency-based aggregation strategies. Different types of TFA can have a huge impact on the performance of the graph models.