[go: up one dir, main page]
More Web Proxy on the site http://driver.im/
Skip to main content

NABU – Multilingual Graph-Based Neural RDF Verbalizer

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
The Semantic Web – ISWC 2020 (ISWC 2020)

Abstract

The RDF-to-text task has recently gained substantial attention due to continuous growth of Linked Data. In contrast to traditional pipeline models, recent studies have focused on neural models, which are now able to convert a set of RDF triples into text in an end-to-end style with promising results. However, English is the only language widely targeted. We address this research gap by presenting NABU, a multilingual graph-based neural model that verbalizes RDF data to German, Russian, and English. NABU is based on an encoder-decoder architecture, uses an encoder inspired by Graph Attention Networks and a Transformer as decoder. Our approach relies on the fact that knowledge graphs are language-agnostic and they hence can be used to generate multilingual text. We evaluate NABU in monolingual and multilingual settings on standard benchmarking WebNLG datasets. Our results show that NABU outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on English with 66.21 BLEU, and achieves consistent results across all languages on the multilingual scenario with 56.04 BLEU.

D. Moussallem and D. Gnaneshwar—Equal contribution

D. Moussallem, D. Gnaneshwar and T. Castro Ferreira—This work was carried out under the Google Summer of Code 2019.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Subscribe and save

Springer+ Basic
£29.99 /Month
  • Get 10 units per month
  • Download Article/Chapter or eBook
  • 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
  • Cancel anytime
Subscribe now

Buy Now

Chapter
GBP 19.95
Price includes VAT (United Kingdom)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
GBP 71.50
Price includes VAT (United Kingdom)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
GBP 89.99
Price includes VAT (United Kingdom)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. 1.

    https://github.com/dice-group/NABU.

  2. 2.

    Not to be confused with RDFS reification.

  3. 3.

    https://github.com/google/sentencepiece.

References

  1. Anselma, L., Mazzei, A.: Designing and testing the messages produced by a virtual dietitian. In: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Natural Language Generation, Tilburg University, The Netherlands, November 2018, pp. 244–253. Association for Computational Linguistics (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Auer, S., Bizer, C., Kobilarov, G., Lehmann, J., Cyganiak, R., Ives, Z.: DBpedia: a nucleus for a web of open data. In: Aberer, K., et al. (eds.) ASWC/ISWC -2007. LNCS, vol. 4825, pp. 722–735. Springer, Heidelberg (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-76298-0_52

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  3. Bahdanau, D., Cho, K., Bengio, Y.: Neural machine translation by jointly learning to align and translate. arXiv preprint arXiv:1409.0473 (2014)

  4. Banerjee, S., Lavie, A.: METEOR: an automatic metric for MT evaluation with improved correlation with human judgments. In: Proceedings of the ACL Workshop on Intrinsic and Extrinsic Evaluation Measures for MT and/or Summarization, pp. 65–72. ACL (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Beck, D., Haffari, G., Cohn, T.: Graph-to-sequence learning using gated graph neural networks. In: Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pp. 273–283 (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Belz, A., White, M., Espinosa, D., Kow, E., Hogan, D., Stent, A.: The first surface realisation shared task: overview and evaluation results. In: Proceedings of the 13th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation, Nancy, France, pp. 217–226. Association for Computational Linguistics (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Bouayad-Agha, N., Casamayor, G., Wanner, L.: Natural language generation in the context of the semantic web. Semant. Web 5(6), 493–513 (2014)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Braun, D., Reiter, E., Siddharthan, A.: SaferDrive: an NLG-based behaviour change support system for drivers. Nat. Lang. Eng. 24(4), 551–588 (2018)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Ferreira, T.C., Moussallem, D., Krahmer, E., Wubben, S.: Enriching the WebNLG corpus. In: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Natural Language Generation, pp. 171–176. Association for Computational Linguistics (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Cimiano, P., Lüker, J., Nagel, D., Unger, C.: Exploiting ontology lexica for generating natural language texts from RDF data. In: Proceedings of the 14th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation, Sofia, Bulgaria, August 2013, pp. 10–19. ACL (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Colin, E., Gardent, C., Mrabet, Y., Narayan, S., Perez-Beltrachini, L.: The WebNLG challenge: generating text from DBPedia data. In: Proceedings of the 9th INLG Conference, pp. 163–167 (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Moussallem, D., et al.: RDF2PT: generating Brazilian Portuguese texts from RDF data. In: The 11th Edition of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, Miyazaki (Japan), 7–12 May 2018 (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Distiawan, B., Qi, J., Zhang, R., Wang, W.: GTR-LSTM: a triple encoder for sentence generation from RDF data. In: Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pp. 1627–1637 (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Duma, D., Klein, E.: Generating natural language from linked data: unsupervised template extraction. In: IWCS, pp. 83–94 (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Ell, B., Harth, A.: A language-independent method for the extraction of RDF verbalization templates. In: INLG, pp. 26–34 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Ferreira, T.C., Moussallem, D., Krahmer, E., Wubben, S.: Enriching the WebNLG corpus. In: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Natural Language Generation, pp. 171–176 (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Ferreira, T.C., van der Lee, C., van Miltenburg, E., Krahmer, E.: Neural data-to-text generation: a comparison between pipeline and end-to-end architectures. In: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pp. 552–562 (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Gardent, C., Shimorina, A., Narayan, S., Perez-Beltrachini, L.: Creating training corpora for NLG micro-planners. In: Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pp. 179–188. Association for Computational Linguistics (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Gardent, C., Shimorina, A., Narayan, S., Perez-Beltrachini, L.: The WebNLG challenge: generating text from RDF data. In: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Natural Language Generation, pp. 124–133 (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Gatt, A., Krahmer, E.: Survey of the state of the art in natural language generation: core tasks, applications and evaluation. arXiv preprint arXiv:1703.09902 (2017)

  21. Gehrmann, S., Dai, F., Elder, H., Rush, A.: End-to-end content and plan selection for data-to-text generation. In: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Natural Language Generation, Tilburg University, The Netherlands, November 2018, pp. 46–56. Association for Computational Linguistics (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Gkatzia, D., Hastie, H.F., Lemon, O.: Comparing multi-label classification with reinforcement learning for summarisation of time-series data. In: ACL, no. 1, pp. 1231–1240 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  23. Gu, J., Lu, Z., Li, H., Li, V.O.K.: Incorporating copying mechanism in sequence-to-sequence learning. In: Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, vol. 1, pp. 1631–1640 (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  24. Johnson, M., et al.: Google’s multilingual neural machine translation system: enabling zero-shot translation. Trans. Assoc. Comput. Linguist. 5, 339–351 (2017)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. Kaffee, L.-A., et al.: Mind the (language) gap: generation of multilingual Wikipedia summaries from Wikidata for ArticlePlaceholders. In: Gangemi, A., et al. (eds.) ESWC 2018. LNCS, vol. 10843, pp. 319–334. Springer, Cham (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93417-4_21

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  26. Kipf, T.N., Welling, M.: Semi-supervised classification with graph convolutional networks. arXiv preprint arXiv:1609.02907 (2016)

  27. Kudo, T.: Subword regularization: improving neural network translation models with multiple subword candidates. In: Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pp. 66–75 (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  28. Luong, T., Pham, H., Manning, C.D.: Effective approaches to attention-based neural machine translation. In: Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pp. 1412–1421. ACL (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  29. Marcheggiani, D., Perez, L.: Deep graph convolutional encoders for structured data to text generation. In: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Natural Language Generation, pp. 1–9. Association for Computational Linguistics (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  30. Mei, H., Bansal, M., Walter, M.R.: What to talk about and how? Selective generation using LSTMs with coarse-to-fine alignment. In: Proceedings of the 2016 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, HLT-NAACL 2016, San Diego, California, pp. 720–730. Association for Computational Linguistics (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  31. Mille, S., Belz, A., Bohnet, B., Graham, Y., Pitler, E., Wanner, L.: The first multilingual surface realisation shared task (SR’18): overview and evaluation results. In: Proceedings of the First Workshop on Multilingual Surface Realisation, Melbourne, Australia, July 2018, pp. 1–12. Association for Computational Linguistics (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  32. Mrabet, Y., et al.: Aligning texts and knowledge bases with semantic sentence simplification. In: WebNLG 2016 (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  33. Ngonga Ngomo, A.-C., Röder, M., Moussallem, D., Usbeck, R., Speck, R.: BENGAL: an automatic benchmark generator for entity recognition and linking. In: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Natural Language Generation, pp. 339–349 (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  34. Ngonga Ngomo, A.-C., Moussallem, D., Bühman, L.: A holistic natural language generation framework for the semantic web. In: Proceedings of the International Conference Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, p. 8. ACL (Association for Computational Linguistics) (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  35. Novikova, J., Dusek, O., Rieser, V.: The E2E dataset: new challenges for end-to-end generation. In: Proceedings of the 18th Annual SIGDIAL Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue, Saarbrücken, Germany, pp. 201–206 (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  36. Papineni, K., Roukos, S., Ward, T., Zhu, W.-J.: BLEU: a method for automatic evaluation of machine translation. In: Proceedings of the 40th Annual Meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  37. Popović, M.: chrF++: words helping character n-grams. In: Proceedings of the Second Conference on Machine Translation, pp. 612–618 (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  38. Reiter, E., Dale, R.: Building Natural Language Generation Systems. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2000)

    Book  Google Scholar 

  39. Ribeiro, L.F.R., Zhang, Y., Gardent, C., Gurevych, I.: Modeling global and local node contexts for text generation from knowledge graphs. arXiv preprint arXiv:2001.11003 (2020)

  40. Sellam, T., Das, D., Parikh, A.: BLEURT: learning robust metrics for text generation. In: Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, July 2020, pp. 7881–7892. Association for Computational Linguistics (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  41. Sennrich, R., Haddow, B., Birch, A.: Neural machine translation of rare words with subword units. In: Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), ACL 2016, Berlin, Germany, pp. 1715–1725. Association for Computational Linguistics (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  42. Shimorina, A., Khasanova, E., Gardent, C.: Creating a corpus for Russian data-to-text generation using neural machine translation and post-editing. In: Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Balto-Slavic Natural Language Processing, pp. 44–49 (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  43. Sleimi, A., Gardent, C.: Generating paraphrases from DBPedia using deep learning. In: WebNLG 2016, p. 54 (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  44. Tan, X., Ren, Y., He, D., Qin, T., Zhao, Z., Liu, T.-Y.: Multilingual neural machine translation with knowledge distillation. arXiv preprint arXiv:1902.10461 (2019)

  45. Tang, G., Müller, M., Rios, A., Sennrich, R.: Why self-attention? A targeted evaluation of neural machine translation architectures. In: Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pp. 4263–4272 (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  46. Vaswani, A., et al.: Attention is all you need. In: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, pp. 5998–6008 (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  47. Veličković, P., Cucurull, G., Casanova, A., Romero, A., Lio, P., Bengio, Y.: Graph attention networks. arXiv preprint arXiv:1710.10903 (2017)

  48. Xu, K., et al.: Show, attend and tell: neural image caption generation with visual attention. In: International Conference on Machine Learning, pp. 2048–2057 (2015)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

Research funded by the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology (BMWI) in the project RAKI (no. 01MD19012D) and by the H2020 KnowGraphs (GA no. 860801). This work also has been supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) within the project DAIKIRI under the grant no 01IS19085B as well as by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi) within the project SPEAKER under the grant no 01MK20011U. Finally, we also would like to thank the funding provided by the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES) from Brazil under the grant 88887.367980/2019-00.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Diego Moussallem .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Moussallem, D., Gnaneshwar, D., Castro Ferreira, T., Ngonga Ngomo, AC. (2020). NABU – Multilingual Graph-Based Neural RDF Verbalizer. In: Pan, J.Z., et al. The Semantic Web – ISWC 2020. ISWC 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12506. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62419-4_24

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62419-4_24

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-62418-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-62419-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics