You will be shown sections from a scientific research paper, together with a question about the paper. Your task is to answer the question based on the contents of the paper. Your response should be a `json` object with two fields:

"answer": An array of strings extracted directly from the paper which, collectively, answer the question.
"evidence": An array of strings. Each should be an excerpt from the paper, in which one or more of the extracted answers can be found.

For instance, for the question "What baselines did the authors compare against?", a sample response might be:

{
  "answer": ["BERT", "RoBERTa"],
  "evidence": ["In our experiments, we compare the performance of our model against BERT and RoBERTa."]
}

Do not include any text in your response other than the json.

If the question is unanswerable given the provided excerpts, respond with the single word "null".

Paper: A Hierarchical Model for Data-to-Text Generation

Transcribing structured data into natural language descriptions has emerged as a challenging task, referred to as "data-to-text". These structures generally regroup multiple elements, as well as their attributes. Most attempts rely on translation encoder-decoder methods which linearize elements into a sequence. This however loses most of the structure contained in the data. In this work, we propose to overpass this limitation with a hierarchical model that encodes the data-structure at the element-level and the structure level. Evaluations on RotoWire show the effectiveness of our model w.r.t. qualitative and quantitative metrics.

Hierarchical Encoder Model for Data-to-Text ::: Hierarchical Encoding Model ::: Record Embedding Layer.
The first layer of the network consists in learning two embedding matrices to embed the record keys and values. Keys $k_{i,j}$ are embedded to $\mathbf {k}_{i,j} \in \mathbb {R}^{d}$ and values $v_{i,j}$ to $\mathbf {v}_{i,j} \in \mathbb {R}^{d}$, with $d$ the size of the embedding. As in previous work BIBREF11, BIBREF12, BIBREF10, each record embedding $\mathbf {r}_{i,j}$ is computed by a linear projection on the concatenation $[\mathbf {k}_{i,j}$; $\mathbf {v}_{i,j}]$ followed by a non linearity:
where $\mathbf {W}_r \in \mathbb {R}^{2d \times d}$ and $\mathbf {b}_r \in \mathbb {R}^{d}$ are learnt parameters.
The low-level encoder aims at encoding a collection of records belonging to the same entity while the high-level encoder encodes the whole set of entities. Both the low-level and high-level encoders consider their input elements as unordered. We use the Transformer architecture from BIBREF21. For each encoder, we have the following peculiarities:
the Low-level encoder encodes each entity $e_i$ on the basis of its record embeddings $\mathbf {r}_{i,j}$. Each record embedding $\mathbf {r}_{i,j}$ is compared to other record embeddings to learn its final hidden representation $\mathbf {h}_{i,j}$. Furthermore, we add a special record [ENT] for each entity, illustrated in Figure FIGREF11 as the last record. Since entities might have a variable number of records, this token allows to aggregate final hidden record representations $\lbrace \mathbf {h}_{i,j}\rbrace _{j=1}^{J_i}$ in a fixed-sized representation vector $\mathbf {h}_{i}$.
the High-level encoder encodes the data-structure on the basis of its entity representation $\mathbf {h}_{i}$. Similarly to the Low-level encoder, the final hidden state $\mathbf {e_i}$ of an entity is computed by comparing entity representation $\mathbf {h}_{i}$ with each others. The data-structure representation $\mathbf {z}$ is computed as the mean of these entity representations, and is used for the decoder initialization.

Experimental setup ::: Evaluation metrics ::: BLEU Score.
The BLEU score BIBREF34 is commonly used as an evaluation metric in text generation tasks. It estimates the correspondence between a machine output and that of a human by computing the number of co-occurrences for ngrams ($n \in {1, 2, 3, 4}$) between the generated candidate and the ground truth. We use the implementation code released by BIBREF35.

Experimental setup ::: Baselines
We compare our hierarchical model against three systems. For each of them, we report the results of the best performing models presented in each paper.
$\bullet $ Wiseman BIBREF10 is a standard encoder-decoder system with copy mechanism.
$\bullet $ Li BIBREF28 is a standard encoder-decoder with a delayed copy mechanism: text is first generated with placeholders, which are replaced by salient records extracted from the table by a pointer network.
$\bullet $ Puduppully-plan BIBREF12 acts in two steps: a first standard encoder-decoder generates a plan, i.e. a list of salient records from the table; a second standard encoder-decoder generates text from this plan.
$\bullet $ Puduppully-updt BIBREF13. It consists in a standard encoder-decoder, with an added module aimed at updating record representations during the generation process. At each decoding step, a gated recurrent network computes which records should be updated and what should be their new representation.

Results ::: Ablation studies
To evaluate the impact of our model components, we first compare scenarios Flat, Hierarchical-k, and Hierarchical-kv. As shown in Table TABREF25, we can see the lower results obtained by the Flat scenario compared to the other scenarios (e.g. BLEU $16.7$ vs. $17.5$ for resp. Flat and Hierarchical-k), suggesting the effectiveness of encoding the data-structure using a hierarchy. This is expected, as losing explicit delimitation between entities makes it harder a) for the encoder to encode semantics of the objects contained in the table and b) for the attention mechanism to extract salient entities/records.
Second, the comparison between scenario Hierarchical-kv and Hierarchical-k shows that omitting entirely the influence of the record values in the attention mechanism is more effective: this last variant performs slightly better in all metrics excepted CS-R%, reinforcing our intuition that focusing on the structure modeling is an important part of data encoding as well as confirming the intuition explained in Section SECREF16: once an entity is selected, facts about this entity are relevant based on their key, not value which might add noise. To illustrate this intuition, we depict in Figure FIGREF27 attention scores (recall $\alpha _{i,t}$ and $\beta _{i,j,t}$ from equations (SECREF16) and (DISPLAY_FORM17)) for both variants Hierarchical-kv and Hierarchical-k. We particularly focus on the timestamp where the models should mention the number of points scored during the first quarter of the game. Scores of Hierarchical-k are sharp, with all of the weight on the correct record (PTS_QTR1, 26) whereas scores of Hierarchical-kv are more distributed over all PTS_QTR records, ultimately failing to retrieve the correct one.

Results ::: Comparison w.r.t. baselines.
From a general point of view, we can see from Table TABREF25 that our scenarios obtain significantly higher results in terms of BLEU over all models; our best model Hierarchical-k reaching $17.5$ vs. $16.5$ against the best baseline. This means that our models learns to generate fluent sequences of words, close to the gold descriptions, adequately picking up on domain lingo. Qualitative metrics are either better or on par with baselines. We show in Figure FIGREF29 a text generated by our best model, which can be directly compared to the gold description in Figure FIGREF1. Generation is fluent and contains domain-specific expressions. As reflected in Table TABREF25, the number of correct mentions (in green) outweights the number of incorrect mentions (in red). Please note that, as in previous work BIBREF28, BIBREF12, BIBREF13, BIBREF10, generated texts still contain a number of incorrect facts, as well hallucinations (in blue): sentences that have no basis in the input data (e.g. “[...] he's now averaging 22 points [...]."). While not the direct focus of our work, this highlights that any operation meant to enrich the semantics of structured data can also enrich the data with incorrect facts.
Specifically, regarding all baselines, we can outline the following statements.
$\bullet $ Our hierarchical models achieve significantly better scores on all metrics when compared to the flat architecture Wiseman, reinforcing the crucial role of structure in data semantics and saliency. The analysis of RG metrics shows that Wiseman seems to be the more naturalistic in terms of number of factual mentions (RG#) since it is the closest scenario to the gold value (16.83 vs. 17.31 for resp. Wiseman and Hierarchical-k). However, Wiseman achieves only $75.62$% of precision, effectively mentioning on average a total of $22.25$ records (wrong or accurate), where our model Hierarchical-k scores a precision of $89.46$%, leading to $23.66$ total mentions, just slightly above Wiseman.
$\bullet $ The comparison between the Flat scenario and Wiseman is particularly interesting. Indeed, these two models share the same intuition to flatten the data-structure. The only difference stands on the encoder mechanism: bi-LSTM vs. Transformer, for Wiseman and Flat respectively. Results shows that our Flat scenario obtains a significant higher BLEU score (16.7 vs. 14.5) and generates fluent descriptions with accurate mentions (RG-P%) that are also included in the gold descriptions (CS-R%). This suggests that introducing the Transformer architecture is promising way to implicitly account for data structure.
$\bullet $ Our hierarchical models outperform the two-step decoders of Li and Puduppully-plan on both BLEU and all qualitative metrics, showing that capturing structure in the encoding process is more effective that predicting a structure in the decoder (i.e., planning or templating). While our models sensibly outperform in precision at factual mentions, the baseline Puduppully-plan reaches $34.28$ mentions on average, showing that incorporating modules dedicated to entity extraction leads to over-focusing on entities; contrasting with our models that learn to generate more balanced descriptions.
$\bullet $ The comparison with Puduppully-updt shows that dynamically updating the encoding across the generation process can lead to better Content Ordering (CO) and RG-P%. However, this does not help with Content Selection (CS) since our best model Hierarchical-k obtains slightly better scores. Indeed, Puduppully-updt updates representations after each mention allowing to keep track of the mention history. This guides the ordering of mentions (CO metric), each step limiting more the number of candidate mentions (increasing RG-P%). In contrast, our model encodes saliency among records/entities more effectively (CS metric). We note that while our model encodes the data-structure once and for all, Puduppully-updt recomputes, via the updates, the encoding at each step and therefore significantly increases computation complexity. Combined with their RG-# score of $30.11$, we argue that our model is simpler, and obtains fluent description with accurate mentions in a more human-like fashion.
We would also like to draw attention to the number of parameters used by those architectures. We note that our scenarios relies on a lower number of parameters (14 millions) compared to all baselines (ranging from 23 to 45 millions). This outlines the effectiveness in the design of our model relying on a structure encoding, in contrast to other approach that try to learn the structure of data/descriptions from a linearized encoding.

Conclusion and future work
In this work we have proposed a hierarchical encoder for structured data, which 1) leverages the structure to form efficient representation of its input; 2) has strong synergy with the hierarchical attention of its associated decoder. This results in an effective and more light-weight model. Experimental evaluation on the RotoWire benchmark shows that our model outperforms competitive baselines in terms of BLEU score and is generally better on qualitative metrics. This way of representing structured databases may lead to automatic inference and enrichment, e.g., by comparing entities. This direction could be driven by very recent operation-guided networks BIBREF39, BIBREF40. In addition, we note that our approach can still lead to erroneous facts or even hallucinations. An interesting perspective might be to further constrain the model on the data structure in order to prevent inaccurate of even contradictory descriptions.

Fig. 2: Diagram of the proposed hierarchical encoder. Once the records are embedded, the low-level encoder works on each entity independently (A); then the high-level encoder encodes the collection of entities (B). In circles, we represent the hierarchical attention scores: the α scores at the entity level and the β scores at the record level.

Question: What is quantitative improvement of proposed method (the best variant) w.r.t. baseline (the best variant)?
{"answer": ["Hierarchical-k"], "evidence": ["To evaluate the impact of our model components, we first compare scenarios Flat, Hierarchical-k, and Hierarchical-kv. As shown in Table TABREF25, we can see the lower results obtained by the Flat scenario compared to the other scenarios (e.g. BLEU $16.7$ vs. $17.5$ for resp. Flat and Hierarchical-k), suggesting the effectiveness of encoding the data-structure using a hierarchy. This is expected, as losing explicit delimitation between entities makes it harder a) for the encoder to encode semantics of the objects contained in the table and b) for the attention mechanism to extract salient entities/records."]}