  Data-to-text generation is challenging due to the great variety of the input
data in terms of domains (e.g., finance vs sports) or schemata (e.g., diverse
predicates). Recent end-to-end neural methods thus require substantial training
examples to learn to disambiguate and describe the data. Yet, real-world
data-to-text problems often suffer from various data-scarce issues: one may
have access to only a handful of or no training examples, and/or have to rely
on examples in a different domain or schema. To fill this gap, we propose
Any-Shot Data-to-Text (ASDOT), a new approach flexibly applicable to diverse
settings by making efficient use of any given (or no) examples. ASDOT consists
of two steps, data disambiguation and sentence fusion, both of which are
amenable to be solved with off-the-shelf pretrained language models (LMs) with
optional finetuning. In the data disambiguation stage, we employ the prompted
GPT-3 model to understand possibly ambiguous triples from the input data and
convert each into a short sentence with reduced ambiguity. The sentence fusion
stage then uses an LM like T5 to fuse all the resulting sentences into a
coherent paragraph as the final description. We evaluate extensively on various
datasets in different scenarios, including the zero-/few-/full-shot settings,
and generalization to unseen predicates and out-of-domain data. Experimental
results show that ASDOT consistently achieves significant improvement over
baselines, e.g., a 30.81 BLEU gain on the DART dataset under the zero-shot
setting.
