  We propose an end-to-end, domain-independent neural encoder-aligner-decoder
model for selective generation, i.e., the joint task of content selection and
surface realization. Our model first encodes a full set of over-determined
database event records via an LSTM-based recurrent neural network, then
utilizes a novel coarse-to-fine aligner to identify the small subset of salient
records to talk about, and finally employs a decoder to generate free-form
descriptions of the aligned, selected records. Our model achieves the best
selection and generation results reported to-date (with 59% relative
improvement in generation) on the benchmark WeatherGov dataset, despite using
no specialized features or linguistic resources. Using an improved k-nearest
neighbor beam filter helps further. We also perform a series of ablations and
visualizations to elucidate the contributions of our key model components.
Lastly, we evaluate the generalizability of our model on the RoboCup dataset,
and get results that are competitive with or better than the state-of-the-art,
despite being severely data-starved.
