Machine Translation Pre-training for Data-to-Text Generation -- A Case Study in Czech

Understand

While there is a large body of research studying deep learning methods for text generation from structured data, almost all of it focuses purely on English.

• In this paper, we study the effectiveness of machine translation based pre-training for data-to-text generation in non-English languages.
• Since the structured data is generally expressed in English, text generation into other languages involves elements of translation, transliteration and copying - elements already encoded in neural machine translation systems.
• Moreover, since data-to-text corpora are typically small, this task can benefit greatly from pre-training.