2021 Volume 28 Issue 4 Pages 1210-1246
This research investigates the task of generating weather-forecast comments from simulation results of numerical weather prediction. This task has the following requirements. (i) The changes in numerical values for various physical quantities must be considered; (ii) the weather comments should be dependent on delivery time and area information; and (iii) the comments should provide useful information for users. To meet these requirements, we propose a data-to-text model, incorporating three types of encoders for numerical forecast maps, observation data, and metadata. We also introduce weather labels representing weather information, such as sunny or rain, in our model to describe useful information explicitly. Furthermore, we conducted automatic and human evaluations. The results indicate that our model exhibits the best performance when compared with baseline models in terms of informativeness.