How Much is 131 Million Dollars? Putting Numbers in Perspective with Compositional Descriptions
Arun Chaganty, Percy Liang · 2016
How much is 131 million US dollars?To help readers put such numbers in context, we propose a new task of automatically generating short descriptions known as perspectives, e.g."$131 million is about the cost to employ everyone in Texas over a lunch period".First, we collect a dataset of numeric mentions in news articles, where each mention is labeled with a set of rated perspectives.We then propose a system to generate these descriptions consisting of two steps: formula construction and description generation.In construction, we compose formulae from numeric facts in a knowledge base and rank the resulting formulas based on familiarity, numeric proximity and semantic compatibility.In generation, we convert a formula into natural language using a sequence-to-sequence recurrent neural network.Our system obtains a 15.2% F 1 improvement over a non-compositional baseline at formula construction and a 12.5 BLEU point improvement over a baseline description generation.