Learning to Order Graph Elements with Application to Multilingual Surface Realization

Recent advances in deep learning have shown promises in solving complex combinatorial optimization problems, such as sorting variable-sized sequences. In this work, we take a step further and tackle the problem of ordering the elements of sequences that come with graph structures. Our solution adopts an encoder-decoder framework, in which the encoder is a graph neural network that learns the representation for each element, and the decoder predicts the ordering of each local neighborhood of the graph in turn. We apply our framework to multilingual surface realization, which is the task of ordering and completing sentences with their dependency parses given but without the ordering of words. Experiments show that our approach is much better for this task than prior works that do not consider graph structures. We participated in 2019 Surface Realization Shared Task (SR{'}19), and we ranked second out of 14 teams while outperforming those teams below by a large margin.