| Summary: | Surrounded by structured data, such as medical data, financial data, knowledge bases, etc., data-to-text generation has become an important natural language processing task that can help people better understand the meaning of those data by providing them with user-friendly text. Existing methods for data-to-text generation show promising results in tackling two major challenges: content planning and surface realization, which transform structured data into fluent text. However, they lack an iterative refinement process for generating text, which can enable the model to perfect the text step-by-step while accepting control over the process. In this paper, we explore enhancing data-to-text generation with an iterative refinement process via diffusion. We have four main contributions: (1) we use the diffusion model to improve the prefix tuning for data-to-text generation; (2) we propose a look-ahead guiding loss to supervise the iterative refinement process for better text generation; (3) we extract content plans from reference text and propose a planning-then-writing pipeline to give the model content planning ability; and (4) we conducted experiments on three data-to-text generation datasets and both automatic evaluation criteria (BLEU, NIST, METEOR, <inline-formula><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><msub><mi>ROUGE</mi><mi>L</mi></msub></semantics></math></inline-formula>, CIDEr, TER, MoverScore, BLEURT, and BERTScore) and human evaluation criteria (Quality and Naturalness) show the effectiveness of our model. Our model can improve the competitive prefix tuning method by 2.19% in terms of a widely-used automatic evaluation criterion BLEU (BiLingual Evaluation Understudy) on WebNLG dataset with GPT-2 Large as the pretrained language model backbone. Human evaluation criteria also show that our model can improve the quality and naturalness of the generated text across all three datasets.
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