AugNLG: Few-shot Natural Language Generation using Self-trained Data Augmentation

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-ofthe-art methods on the FEWSHOTWOZ data in both BLEU and Slot Error Rate. We further confirm improved results on the FEW-SHOTSGD data and provide comprehensive analysis results on key components of our system. Our code and data are available at https: //github.com/XinnuoXu/AugNLG.

MR: inform_no_match (kidsallowed = yes) TEXT: I cannot find restaurants with kids allowed.