PLOG: Table-to-Logic Pretraining for Logical Table-to-Text Generation

Logical table-to-text generation is a task that involves generating logically faithful sentences from tables, which requires models to derive logical-level facts from table records via logical inference. It raises a new challenge on the logical-level content planning of table-to-text models. However, directly learning the logical inference knowledge from table-text pairs is very difficult for neural models because of the ambiguity of natural language and the scarcity of parallel data. Hence even large-scale pre-trained language models present low logical fidelity on logical table-to-text. In this work, we propose a Pretrained Logical Form Generator (PLOG) framework to improve generation fidelity. Specifically, PLOG is first pretrained on a table-to-logical-form generation (table-to-logic) task, then finetuned on downstream table-to-text tasks. The logical forms are formally defined with unambiguous semantics. Hence we can collect a large amount of accurate logical forms from tables without human annotation. In addition, PLOG can learn logical inference from table-logic pairs much more reliably than from table-text pairs. To evaluate our model, we further collect a controlled logical table-to-text dataset CONTLOG based on an existing dataset. On two benchmarks, LOGICNLG and CONTLOG, PLOG outperforms strong baselines by a large margin on the logical fidelity, demonstrating the effectiveness of table-to-logic pretraining.