  The neural attention model has achieved great success in data-to-text
generation tasks. Though usually excelling at producing fluent text, it suffers
from the problem of information missing, repetition and "hallucination". Due to
the black-box nature of the neural attention architecture, avoiding these
problems in a systematic way is non-trivial. To address this concern, we
propose to explicitly segment target text into fragment units and align them
with their data correspondences. The segmentation and correspondence are
jointly learned as latent variables without any human annotations. We further
impose a soft statistical constraint to regularize the segmental granularity.
The resulting architecture maintains the same expressive power as neural
attention models, while being able to generate fully interpretable outputs with
several times less computational cost. On both E2E and WebNLG benchmarks, we
show the proposed model consistently outperforms its neural attention
counterparts.
