huashen218/convxai-cia-dataset huggingface dataset:
PENS: A Dataset and Generic Framework for Personalized News Headline Generation
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Association for Computational Linguistics, Online, August 2021)

Abstract: In this paper, we formulate the personalized news headline generation problem whose goal is to output a user-specific title based on both a user{'}s reading interests and a candidate news body to be exposed to her. To build up a benchmark for this problem, we publicize a large-scale dataset named PENS (PErsonalized News headlineS). The training set is collected from user impressions logs of Microsoft News, and the test set is manually created by hundreds of native speakers to enable a fair testbed for evaluating models in an offline mode. We propose a generic framework as a preparatory solution to our problem. At its heart, user preference is learned by leveraging the user behavioral data, and three kinds of user preference injections are proposed to personalize a text generator and establish personalized headlines. We investigate our dataset by implementing several state-of-the-art user modeling methods in our framework to demonstrate a benchmark score for the proposed dataset. The dataset is available at https://msnews.github.io/pens.html.
Enhancing Content Preservation in Text Style Transfer Using Reverse Attention and Conditional Layer Normalization
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Association for Computational Linguistics, Online, August 2021)

Abstract: Text style transfer aims to alter the style (e.g., sentiment) of a sentence while preserving its content. A common approach is to map a given sentence to content representation that is free of style, and the content representation is fed to a decoder with a target style. Previous methods in filtering style completely remove tokens with style at the token level, which incurs the loss of content information. In this paper, we propose to enhance content preservation by implicitly removing the style information of each token with reverse attention, and thereby retain the content. Furthermore, we fuse content information when building the target style representation, making it dynamic with respect to the content. Our method creates not only style-independent content representation, but also content-dependent style representation in transferring style. Empirical results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines by a large margin in terms of content preservation. In addition, it is also competitive in terms of style transfer accuracy and fluency.
Mention Flags (MF): Constraining Transformer-based Text Generators
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Association for Computational Linguistics, Online, August 2021)

Abstract: This paper focuses on Seq2Seq (S2S) constrained text generation where the text generator is constrained to mention specific words which are inputs to the encoder in the generated outputs. Pre-trained S2S models or a Copy Mechanism are trained to copy the surface tokens from encoders to decoders, but they cannot guarantee constraint satisfaction. Constrained decoding algorithms always produce hypotheses satisfying all constraints. However, they are computationally expensive and can lower the generated text quality. In this paper, we propose Mention Flags (MF), which traces whether lexical constraints are satisfied in the generated outputs in an S2S decoder. The MF models can be trained to generate tokens in a hypothesis until all constraints are satisfied, guaranteeing high constraint satisfaction. Our experiments on the Common Sense Generation task (CommonGen) (Lin et al., 2020), End2end Restaurant Dialog task (E2ENLG) (Du{\v{}}sek et al., 2020) and Novel Object Captioning task (nocaps) (Agrawal et al., 2019) show that the MF models maintain higher constraint satisfaction and text quality than the baseline models and other constrained decoding algorithms, achieving state-of-the-art performance on all three tasks. These results are achieved with a much lower run-time than constrained decoding algorithms. We also show that the MF models work well in the low-resource setting.
Generalising Multilingual Concept-to-Text NLG with Language Agnostic Delexicalisation
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Association for Computational Linguistics, Online, August 2021)

Abstract: Concept-to-text Natural Language Generation is the task of expressing an input meaning representation in natural language. Previous approaches in this task have been able to generalise to rare or unseen instances by relying on a delexicalisation of the input. However, this often requires that the input appears verbatim in the output text. This poses challenges in multilingual settings, where the task expands to generate the output text in multiple languages given the same input. In this paper, we explore the application of multilingual models in concept-to-text and propose Language Agnostic Delexicalisation, a novel delexicalisation method that uses multilingual pretrained embeddings, and employs a character-level post-editing model to inflect words in their correct form during relexicalisation. Our experiments across five datasets and five languages show that multilingual models outperform monolingual models in concept-to-text and that our framework outperforms previous approaches, especially in low resource conditions.
Conversations Are Not Flat: Modeling the Dynamic Information Flow across Dialogue Utterances
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Association for Computational Linguistics, Online, August 2021)

Abstract: Nowadays, open-domain dialogue models can generate acceptable responses according to the historical context based on the large-scale pre-trained language models. However, they generally concatenate the dialogue history directly as the model input to predict the response, which we named as the \textit{flat pattern} and ignores the dynamic information flow across dialogue utterances. In this work, we propose the \textbf{DialoFlow} model, in which we introduce a dynamic flow mechanism to model the context flow, and design three training objectives to capture the information dynamics across dialogue utterances by addressing the semantic influence brought about by each utterance in large-scale pre-training. Experiments on the multi-reference Reddit Dataset and DailyDialog Dataset demonstrate that our DialoFlow significantly outperforms the DialoGPT on the dialogue generation task. Besides, we propose the \textbf{Flow score}, an effective automatic metric for evaluating interactive human-bot conversation quality based on the pre-trained DialoFlow, which presents high chatbot-level correlation ($r=0.9$) with human ratings among 11 chatbots. Code and pre-trained models will be public.
Dual Slot Selector via Local Reliability Verification for Dialogue State Tracking
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Association for Computational Linguistics, Online, August 2021)

Abstract: The goal of dialogue state tracking (DST) is to predict the current dialogue state given all previous dialogue contexts. Existing approaches generally predict the dialogue state at every turn from scratch. However, the overwhelming majority of the slots in each turn should simply inherit the slot values from the previous turn. Therefore, the mechanism of treating slots equally in each turn not only is inefficient but also may lead to additional errors because of the redundant slot value generation. To address this problem, we devise the two-stage DSS-DST which consists of the Dual Slot Selector based on the current turn dialogue, and the Slot Value Generator based on the dialogue history. The Dual Slot Selector determines each slot whether to update slot value or to inherit the slot value from the previous turn from two aspects: (1) if there is a strong relationship between it and the current turn dialogue utterances; (2) if a slot value with high reliability can be obtained for it through the current turn dialogue. The slots selected to be updated are permitted to enter the Slot Value Generator to update values by a hybrid method, while the other slots directly inherit the values from the previous turn. Empirical results show that our method achieves 56.93{\%}, 60.73{\%}, and 58.04{\%} joint accuracy on MultiWOZ 2.0, MultiWOZ 2.1, and MultiWOZ 2.2 datasets respectively and achieves a new state-of-the-art performance with significant improvements.
Transferable Dialogue Systems and User Simulators
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Association for Computational Linguistics, Online, August 2021)

Abstract: One of the difficulties in training dialogue systems is the lack of training data. We explore the possibility of creating dialogue data through the interaction between a dialogue system and a user simulator. Our goal is to develop a modelling framework that can incorporate new dialogue scenarios through self-play between the two agents. In this framework, we first pre-train the two agents on a collection of source domain dialogues, which equips the agents to converse with each other via natural language. With further fine-tuning on a small amount of target domain data, the agents continue to interact with the aim of improving their behaviors using reinforcement learning with structured reward functions. In experiments on the MultiWOZ dataset, two practical transfer learning problems are investigated: 1) domain adaptation and 2) single-to-multiple domain transfer. We demonstrate that the proposed framework is highly effective in bootstrapping the performance of the two agents in transfer learning. We also show that our method leads to improvements in dialogue system performance on complete datasets.
BoB: BERT Over BERT for Training Persona-based Dialogue Models from Limited Personalized Data
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Association for Computational Linguistics, Online, August 2021)

Abstract: Maintaining a consistent persona is essential for dialogue agents. Although tremendous advancements have been brought, the limited-scale of annotated personalized dialogue datasets is still a barrier towards training robust and consistent persona-based dialogue models. This work shows how this challenge can be addressed by disentangling persona-based dialogue generation into two sub-tasks with a novel BERT-over-BERT (BoB) model. Specifically, the model consists of a BERT-based encoder and two BERT-based decoders, where one decoder is for response generation, and another is for consistency understanding. In particular, to learn the ability of consistency understanding from large-scale non-dialogue inference data, we train the second decoder in an unlikelihood manner. Under different limited data settings, both automatic and human evaluations demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms strong baselines in response quality and persona consistency.
GL-GIN: Fast and Accurate Non-Autoregressive Model for Joint Multiple Intent Detection and Slot Filling
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Association for Computational Linguistics, Online, August 2021)

Abstract: Multi-intent SLU can handle multiple intents in an utterance, which has attracted increasing attention. However, the state-of-the-art joint models heavily rely on autoregressive approaches, resulting in two issues: slow inference speed and information leakage. In this paper, we explore a non-autoregressive model for joint multiple intent detection and slot filling, achieving more fast and accurate. Specifically, we propose a Global-Locally Graph Interaction Network (GL-GIN) where a local slot-aware graph interaction layer is proposed to model slot dependency for alleviating uncoordinated slots problem while a global intent-slot graph interaction layer is introduced to model the interaction between multiple intents and all slots in the utterance. Experimental results on two public datasets show that our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance while being 11.5 times faster.
Accelerating BERT Inference for Sequence Labeling via Early-Exit
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Association for Computational Linguistics, Online, August 2021)

Abstract: Both performance and efficiency are crucial factors for sequence labeling tasks in many real-world scenarios. Although the pre-trained models (PTMs) have significantly improved the performance of various sequence labeling tasks, their computational cost is expensive. To alleviate this problem, we extend the recent successful early-exit mechanism to accelerate the inference of PTMs for sequence labeling tasks. However, existing early-exit mechanisms are specifically designed for sequence-level tasks, rather than sequence labeling. In this paper, we first propose a simple extension of sentence-level early-exit for sequence labeling tasks. To further reduce the computational cost, we also propose a token-level early-exit mechanism that allows partial tokens to exit early at different layers. Considering the local dependency inherent in sequence labeling, we employed a window-based criterion to decide for a token whether or not to exit. The token-level early-exit brings the gap between training and inference, so we introduce an extra self-sampling fine-tuning stage to alleviate it. The extensive experiments on three popular sequence labeling tasks show that our approach can save up to 66{\%}â¼75{\%} inference cost with minimal performance degradation. Compared with competitive compressed models such as DistilBERT, our approach can achieve better performance under the same speed-up ratios of 2{\mbox{$\times$}}, 3{\mbox{$\times$}}, and 4{\mbox{$\times$}}.
Modularized Interaction Network for Named Entity Recognition
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Association for Computational Linguistics, Online, August 2021)

Abstract: Although the existing Named Entity Recognition (NER) models have achieved promising performance, they suffer from certain drawbacks. The sequence labeling-based NER models do not perform well in recognizing long entities as they focus only on word-level information, while the segment-based NER models which focus on processing segment instead of single word are unable to capture the word-level dependencies within the segment. Moreover, as boundary detection and type prediction may cooperate with each other for the NER task, it is also important for the two sub-tasks to mutually reinforce each other by sharing their information. In this paper, we propose a novel Modularized Interaction Network (MIN) model which utilizes both segment-level information and word-level dependencies, and incorporates an interaction mechanism to support information sharing between boundary detection and type prediction to enhance the performance for the NER task. We have conducted extensive experiments based on three NER benchmark datasets. The performance results have shown that the proposed MIN model has outperformed the current state-of-the-art models.
Capturing Event Argument Interaction via A Bi-Directional Entity-Level Recurrent Decoder
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Association for Computational Linguistics, Online, August 2021)

Abstract: Capturing interactions among event arguments is an essential step towards robust event argument extraction (EAE). However, existing efforts in this direction suffer from two limitations: 1) The argument role type information of contextual entities is mainly utilized as training signals, ignoring the potential merits of directly adopting it as semantically rich input features; 2) The argument-level sequential semantics, which implies the overall distribution pattern of argument roles over an event mention, is not well characterized. To tackle the above two bottlenecks, we formalize EAE as a Seq2Seq-like learning problem for the first time, where a sentence with a specific event trigger is mapped to a sequence of event argument roles. A neural architecture with a novel Bi-directional Entity-level Recurrent Decoder (BERD) is proposed to generate argument roles by incorporating contextual entities{'} argument role predictions, like a word-by-word text generation process, thereby distinguishing implicit argument distribution patterns within an event more accurately.
UniRE: A Unified Label Space for Entity Relation Extraction
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Association for Computational Linguistics, Online, August 2021)

Abstract: Many joint entity relation extraction models setup two separated label spaces for the two sub-tasks (i.e., entity detection and relation classification). We argue that this setting may hinder the information interaction between entities and relations. In this work, we propose to eliminate the different treatment on the two sub-tasks{'} label spaces. The input of our model is a table containing all word pairs from a sentence. Entities and relations are represented by squares and rectangles in the table. We apply a unified classifier to predict each cell{'}s label, which unifies the learning of two sub-tasks. For testing, an effective (yet fast) approximate decoder is proposed for finding squares and rectangles from tables. Experiments on three benchmarks (ACE04, ACE05, SciERC) show that, using only half the number of parameters, our model achieves competitive accuracy with the best extractor, and is faster.
Refining Sample Embeddings with Relation Prototypes to Enhance Continual Relation Extraction
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Association for Computational Linguistics, Online, August 2021)

Abstract: Continual learning has gained increasing attention in recent years, thanks to its biological interpretation and efficiency in many real-world applications. As a typical task of continual learning, continual relation extraction (CRE) aims to extract relations between entities from texts, where the samples of different relations are delivered into the model continuously. Some previous works have proved that storing typical samples of old relations in memory can help the model keep a stable understanding of old relations and avoid forgetting them. However, most methods heavily depend on the memory size in that they simply replay these memorized samples in subsequent tasks. To fully utilize memorized samples, in this paper, we employ relation prototype to extract useful information of each relation. Specifically, the prototype embedding for a specific relation is computed based on memorized samples of this relation, which is collected by K-means algorithm. The prototypes of all observed relations at current learning stage are used to re-initialize a memory network to refine subsequent sample embeddings, which ensures the model{'}s stable understanding on all observed relations when learning a new task. Compared with previous CRE models, our model utilizes the memory information sufficiently and efficiently, resulting in enhanced CRE performance. Our experiments show that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art CRE models and has great advantage in avoiding catastrophic forgetting. The code and datasets are released on https://github.com/fd2014cl/RP-CRE.
Contrastive Learning for Many-to-many Multilingual Neural Machine Translation
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Association for Computational Linguistics, Online, August 2021)

Abstract: Existing multilingual machine translation approaches mainly focus on English-centric directions, while the non-English directions still lag behind. In this work, we aim to build a many-to-many translation system with an emphasis on the quality of non-English language directions. Our intuition is based on the hypothesis that a universal cross-language representation leads to better multilingual translation performance. To this end, we propose mRASP2, a training method to obtain a single unified multilingual translation model. mRASP2 is empowered by two techniques: a) a contrastive learning scheme to close the gap among representations of different languages, and b) data augmentation on both multiple parallel and monolingual data to further align token representations. For English-centric directions, mRASP2 achieves competitive or even better performance than a strong pre-trained model mBART on tens of WMT benchmarks. For non-English directions, mRASP2 achieves an improvement of average 10+ BLEU compared with the multilingual baseline
Understanding the Properties of Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding in Neural Machine Translation
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Association for Computational Linguistics, Online, August 2021)

Abstract: Neural Machine Translation (NMT) currently exhibits biases such as producing translations that are too short and overgenerating frequent words, and shows poor robustness to copy noise in training data or domain shift. Recent work has tied these shortcomings to beam search {--} the de facto standard inference algorithm in NMT {--} and Eikema {\&} Aziz (2020) propose to use Minimum Bayes Risk (MBR) decoding on unbiased samples instead. In this paper, we empirically investigate the properties of MBR decoding on a number of previously reported biases and failure cases of beam search. We find that MBR still exhibits a length and token frequency bias, owing to the MT metrics used as utility functions, but that MBR also increases robustness against copy noise in the training data and domain shift.