Natural Language Generation (NLG) is a key component in a task-oriented dialogue system, which converts the structured meaning representation (MR) to the natural language. For large-scale conversational systems, where it is common to have over hundreds of intents and thousands of slots, neither template-based approaches nor model-based approaches are scalable. Recently, neural NLGs started leveraging transfer learning and showed promising results in few-shot settings. This paper proposes AUGNLG, a novel data augmentation approach that combines a self-trained neural retrieval model with a few-shot learned NLU model, to automatically create MR-to-Text data from open-domain texts. The proposed system mostly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the FewShotWOZ data in both BLEU and Slot Error Rate. We further confirm improved results on the FewShotSGD data and provide comprehensive analysis results on key components of our system. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/XinnuoXu/AugNLG.

本篇论文提出了一种名为 AUGNLG 的新型数据增强方法，将自我训练的神经内存模型与少量训练的神经语言理解模型结合起来，自动从开放领域的文本中创建 MR-to-Text 数据，以提高自然语言生成的效率并在 FewShotWOZ 数据上表现优异。

AUGNLG: 自训练数据增强的小样本自然语言生成