108 - Data-To-Text Generation, with Verena Rieser and Ondřej Dušek

108 - Data-To-Text Generation, with Verena Rieser and Ondřej Dušek

Author: Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence March 23, 2020 Duration: 49:30
In this episode we invite Verena Rieser and Ondřej Dušek on to talk to us about the complexities of generating natural language when you have some kind of structured meaning representation as input. We talk about when you might want to do this, which is often is some kind of a dialog system, but also generating game summaries, and even some language modeling work. We then talk about why this is hard, which in large part is due to the difficulty of collecting data, and how to evaluate the output of these systems. We then move on to discussing the details of a major challenge that Verena and Ondřej put on, called the end-to-end natural language generation challenge (E2E NLG). This was a dataset of task-based dialog generation focused on the restaurant domain, with some very innovative data collection techniques. They held a shared task with 16 participating teams in 2017, and the data has been further used since. We talk about the methods that people used for the task, and what we can learn today from what methods have been used on this data. Verena's website: https://sites.google.com/site/verenateresarieser/ Ondřej's website: https://tuetschek.github.io/ The E2E NLG Challenge that we talked about quite a bit: http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/InteractionLab/E2E/

While NLP Highlights is currently on hiatus, its archive remains a compelling snapshot of conversations from the front lines of computational linguistics. Produced by the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, this science podcast carved out a space for deep, researcher-led discussions about natural language processing. Each episode functions as an informal seminar, where the people actively designing algorithms and pushing the field forward explain their work in their own words. You'll hear about the nuanced challenges behind making machines understand, generate, and reason with human language, from foundational theories to unexpected applications. The dialogue in this podcast often delves into the "why" behind the research, not just the results, offering clarity on complex topics like machine translation, sentiment analysis, or large language models. It’s a chance to listen as experts articulate their thought processes, debates, and moments of insight, with all the candidness that comes from a conversation between peers. The views shared are personal perspectives from the hosts and their guests, independent of their affiliated institutions. For anyone curious about how machines learn to parse meaning, the archived episodes of NLP Highlights provide a thoughtful and accessible entry point.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 50

NLP Highlights
Podcast Episodes
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