ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A Statistical Approach for Quantifying Group Difference in Topic Distributions Using Clinical Discourse Samples (2023)

Topic distribution matrices created by topic models are typically used for document classification or as features in a separate machine learning algorithm. Existing methods for evaluating these topic distributions include metrics such as coherence and perplexity; however, there is a lack of statistically grounded evaluation tools. We present a statistical method for investigating group differences in the document-topic distribution vectors created by Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) that uses Aitchison geometry to transform the vectors, multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) to compare sample means, and partial eta squared to calculate effect size. Using a corpus of dialogues between Autistic and Typically Developing (TD) children and trained examiners, we found that the topic distributions of Autistic children differed from those of TD children when responding to questions about social difficulties (p = .0083, partial eta squared = .19). Furthermore, the examiners' topic distributions differed between the Autistic and TD groups when discussing emotions (p = .0035, partial eta squared = .20), social difficulties (p {\ensuremath{<}} .001, partial eta squared = .30), and friends (p = .0224, partial eta squared = .17). These results support the use of topic modeling in studying clinically relevant features of social communication such as topic maintenance.
OpinionConv: Conversational Product Search with Grounded Opinions (2023)

When searching for products, the opinions of others play an important role in making informed decisions. Subjective experiences about a product can be a valuable source of information. This is also true in sales conversations, where a customer and a sales assistant exchange facts and opinions about products. However, training an AI for such conversations is complicated by the fact that language models do not possess authentic opinions for their lack of real-world experience. We address this problem by leveraging product reviews as a rich source of product opinions to ground conversational AI in true subjective narratives. With OpinionConv, we develop the first conversational AI for simulating sales conversations. To validate the generated conversations, we conduct several user studies showing that the generated opinions are perceived as realistic. Our assessors also confirm the importance of opinions as an informative basis for decision making.
Dial-M: A Masking-based Framework for Dialogue Evaluation (2023)

In dialogue systems, automatically evaluating machine-generated responses is critical and challenging. Despite the tremendous progress in dialogue generation research, its evaluation heavily depends on human judgments. The standard word-overlapping based evaluation metrics are ineffective for dialogues. As a result, most of the recently proposed metrics are model-based and reference-free, which learn to score different aspects of a conversation. However, understanding each aspect requires a separate model, which makes them computationally expensive. To this end, we propose Dial-M, a Masking-based reference-free framework for Dialogue evaluation. The main idea is to mask the keywords of the current utterance and predict them, given the dialogue history and various conditions (like knowledge, persona, etc.), thereby making the evaluation framework simple and easily extensible for multiple datasets. Regardless of its simplicity, Dial-M achieves comparable performance to state-of-the-art metrics on several dialogue evaluation datasets. We also discuss the interpretability of our proposed metric along with error analysis.
From Chatter to Matter: Addressing Critical Steps of Emotion Recognition Learning in Task-oriented Dialogue (2023)

Emotion recognition in conversations (ERC) is a crucial task for building human-like conversational agents. While substantial efforts have been devoted to ERC for chit-chat dialogues, the task-oriented counterpart is largely left unattended. Directly applying chit-chat ERC models to task-oriented dialogues (ToDs) results in suboptimal performance as these models overlook key features such as the correlation between emotions and task completion in ToDs. In this paper, we propose a framework that turns a chit-chat ERC model into a task-oriented one, addressing three critical aspects: data, features and objective. First, we devise two ways of augmenting rare emotions to improve ERC performance. Second, we use dialogue states as auxiliary features to incorporate key information from the goal of the user. Lastly, we leverage a multi-aspect emotion definition in ToDs to devise a multi-task learning objective and a novel emotion-distance weighted loss function. Our framework yields significant improvements for a range of chit-chat ERC models on EmoWOZ, a large-scale dataset for user emotions in ToDs. We further investigate the generalisability of the best resulting model to predict user satisfaction in different ToD datasets. A comparison with supervised baselines shows a strong zero-shot capability, highlighting the potential usage of our framework in wider scenarios.
Analyzing Differences in Subjective Annotations by Participants and Third-party Annotators in Multimodal Dialogue Corpus (2023)

Estimating the subjective impressions of human users during a dialogue is necessary when constructing a dialogue system that can respond adaptively to their emotional states. However, such subjective impressions (e.g., how much the user enjoys the dialogue) are inherently ambiguous, and the annotation results provided by multiple annotators do not always agree because they depend on the subjectivity of the annotators. In this paper, we analyzed the annotation results using 13,226 exchanges from 155 participants in a multimodal dialogue corpus called Hazumi that we had constructed, where each exchange was annotated by five third-party annotators. We investigated the agreement between the subjective annotations given by the third-party annotators and the participants themselves, on both per-exchange annotations (i.e., participant`s sentiments) and per-dialogue (-participant) annotations (i.e., questionnaires on rapport and personality traits). We also investigated the conditions under which the annotation results are reliable. Our findings demonstrate that the dispersion of third-party sentiment annotations correlates with agreeableness of the participants, one of the Big Five personality traits.
Frame-oriented Summarization of Argumentative Discussions (2023)

Online discussions on controversial topics with many participants frequently include hundreds of arguments that cover different framings of the topic. But these arguments and frames are often spread across the various branches of the discussion tree structure. This makes it difficult for interested participants to follow the discussion in its entirety as well as to introduce new arguments. In this paper, we present a new rank-based approach to extractive summarization of online discussions focusing on argumentation frames that capture the different aspects of a discussion. Our approach includes three retrieval tasks to find arguments in a discussion that are (1) relevant to a frame of interest, (2) relevant to the topic under discussion, and (3) informative to the reader. Based on a joint ranking by these three criteria for a set of user-selected frames, our approach allows readers to quickly access an ongoing discussion. We evaluate our approach using a test set of 100 controversial Reddit ChangeMyView discussions, for which the relevance of a total of 1871 arguments was manually annotated.
Towards Multilingual Automatic Open-Domain Dialogue Evaluation (2023)

The main limiting factor in the development of robust multilingual open-domain dialogue evaluation metrics is the lack of multilingual data and the limited availability of open-sourced multilingual dialogue systems. In this work, we propose a workaround for this lack of data by leveraging a strong multilingual pretrained encoder-based Language Model and augmenting existing English dialogue data using Machine Translation. We empirically show that the naive approach of finetuning a pretrained multilingual encoder model with translated data is insufficient to outperform the strong baseline of finetuning a multilingual model with only source data. Instead, the best approach consists in the careful curation of translated data using MT Quality Estimation metrics, excluding low quality translations that hinder its performance.
Dialog Action-Aware Transformer for Dialog Policy Learning (2023)

Recent works usually address Dialog policy learning DPL by training a reinforcement learning (RL) agent to determine the best dialog action. However, existing works on deep RL require a large volume of agent-user interactions to achieve acceptable performance. In this paper, we propose to make full use of the plain text knowledge from the pre-trained language model to accelerate the RL agent`s learning speed. Specifically, we design a dialog action-aware transformer encoder (DaTrans), which integrates a new fine-tuning procedure named masked last action task to encourage DaTrans to be dialog-aware and distill action-specific features. Then, DaTrans is further optimized in an RL setting with ongoing interactions and evolves through exploration in the dialog action space toward maximizing long-term accumulated rewards. The effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed model are demonstrated with both simulator evaluation and human evaluation.
The Wizard of Curiosities: Enriching Dialogues with Fun Facts (2023)

Introducing curiosities in a conversation is a way to teach something new to the person in a pleasant and enjoyable way. Enriching dialogues with contextualized curiosities can improve the users' perception of a dialog system and their overall user experience. In this paper, we introduce a set of curated curiosities, targeting dialogues in the cooking and DIY domains. In particular, we use real human-agent conversations collected in the context of the Amazon Alexa TaskBot challenge, a multimodal and multi-turn conversational setting. According to an A/B test with over 1000 conversations, curiosities not only increase user engagement, but provide an average relative rating improvement of 9.7{\%}.
The Road to Quality is Paved with Good Revisions: A Detailed Evaluation Methodology for Revision Policies in Incremental Sequence Labelling (2023)

Incremental dialogue model components produce a sequence of output prefixes based on incoming input. Mistakes can occur due to local ambiguities or to wrong hypotheses, making the ability to revise past outputs a desirable property that can be governed by a policy. In this work, we formalise and characterise edits and revisions in incremental sequence labelling and propose metrics to evaluate revision policies. We then apply our methodology to profile the incremental behaviour of three Transformer-based encoders in various tasks, paving the road for better revision policies.
The effect of conversation type on entrainment: Evidence from laughter (2023)

Entrainment is a phenomenon that occurs across several modalities and at different linguistic levels in conversation. Previous work has shown that its effects may be modulated by conversation extrinsic factors, such as the relation between the interlocutors or the speakers' traits. The current study investigates the role of conversation type on laughter entrainment. Employing dyadic interaction materials in German, containing two conversation types (free dialogues and task-based interactions), we analyzed three measures of entrainment previously proposed in the literature. The results show that the entrainment effects depend on the type of conversation, with two of the investigated measures being affected by this factor. These findings represent further evidence towards the role of situational aspects as a mediating factor in conversation.
\textquoteleftWhat are you referring to?' Evaluating the Ability of Multi-Modal Dialogue Models to Process Clarificational Exchanges (2023)

Referential ambiguities arise in dialogue when a referring expression does not uniquely identify the intended referent for the addressee. Addressees usually detect such ambiguities immediately and work with the speaker to repair it using meta-communicative, Clarificational Exchanges (CE): a Clarification Request (CR) and a response. Here, we argue that the ability to generate and respond to CRs imposes specific constraints on the architecture and objective functions of multi-modal, visually grounded dialogue models. We use the SIMMC 2.0 dataset to evaluate the ability of different state-of-the-art model architectures to process CEs, with a metric that probes the contextual updates that arise from them in the model. We find that language-based models are able to encode simple multi-modal semantic information and process some CEs, excelling with those related to the dialogue history, whilst multi-modal models can use additional learning objectives to obtain disentangled object representations, which become crucial to handle complex referential ambiguities across modalities overall.
PGTask: Introducing the Task of Profile Generation from Dialogues (2023)

Recent approaches have attempted to personalize dialogue systems by leveraging profile information into models. However, this knowledge is scarce and difficult to obtain, which makes the extraction/generation of profile information from dialogues a fundamental asset. To surpass this limitation, we introduce the Profile Generation Task (PGTask). We contribute with a new dataset for this problem, comprising profile sentences aligned with related utterances, extracted from a corpus of dialogues. Furthermore, using state-of-the-art methods, we provide a benchmark for profile generation on this novel dataset. Our experiments disclose the challenges of profile generation, and we hope that this introduces a new research direction.
Question Generation to Elicit Users' Food Preferences by Considering the Semantic Content (2023)

To obtain a better understanding of user preferences in providing tailored services, dialogue systems have to generate semi-structured interviews that require flexible dialogue control while following a topic guide to accomplish the purpose of the interview. Toward this goal, this study proposes a semantics-aware GPT-3 fine-tuning model that generates interviews to acquire users' food preferences. The model was trained using dialogue history and semantic representation constructed from the communicative function and semantic content of the utterance. Using two baseline models: zero-shot ChatGPT and fine-tuned GPT-3, we conducted a user study for subjective evaluations alongside automatic objective evaluations. In the user study, in impression rating, the outputs of the proposed model were superior to those of baseline models and comparable to real human interviews in terms of eliciting the interviewees' food preferences.
Roll Up Your Sleeves: Working with a Collaborative and Engaging Task-Oriented Dialogue System (2023)

We introduce TacoBot, a user-centered task-oriented digital assistant designed to guide users through complex real-world tasks with multiple steps. Covering a wide range of cooking and how-to tasks, we aim to deliver a collaborative and engaging dialogue experience. Equipped with language understanding, dialogue management, and response generation components supported by a robust search engine, TacoBot ensures efficient task assistance. To enhance the dialogue experience, we explore a series of data augmentation strategies using LLMs to train advanced neural models continuously. TacoBot builds upon our successful participation in the inaugural Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge, where our team secured third place among ten competing teams. We offer TacoBot as an open-source framework that serves as a practical example for deploying task-oriented dialogue systems.
Leveraging Large Language Models for Automated Dialogue Analysis (2023)

Developing high-performing dialogue systems benefits from the automatic identification of undesirable behaviors in system responses. However, detecting such behaviors remains challenging, as it draws on a breadth of general knowledge and understanding of conversational practices. Although recent research has focused on building specialized classifiers for detecting specific dialogue behaviors, the behavior coverage is still incomplete and there is a lack of testing on real-world human-bot interactions. This paper investigates the ability of a state-of-the-art large language model (LLM), ChatGPT-3.5, to perform dialogue behavior detection for nine categories in real human-bot dialogues. We aim to assess whether ChatGPT can match specialized models and approximate human performance, thereby reducing the cost of behavior detection tasks. Our findings reveal that neither specialized models nor ChatGPT have yet achieved satisfactory results for this task, falling short of human performance. Nevertheless, ChatGPT shows promising potential and often outperforms specialized detection models. We conclude with an in-depth examination of the prevalent shortcomings of ChatGPT, offering guidance for future research to enhance LLM capabilities.
Are Large Language Models All You Need for Task-Oriented Dialogue? (2023)

Instruction-finetuned large language models (LLMs) gained a huge popularity recently, thanks to their ability to interact with users through conversation. In this work, we aim to evaluate their ability to complete multi-turn tasks and interact with external databases in the context of established task-oriented dialogue benchmarks. We show that in explicit belief state tracking, LLMs underperform compared to specialized task-specific models. Nevertheless, they show some ability to guide the dialogue to a successful ending through their generated responses if they are provided with correct slot values. Furthermore, this ability improves with few-shot in-domain examples.
Multi-party Goal Tracking with LLMs: Comparing Pre-training, Fine-tuning, and Prompt Engineering (2023)

This paper evaluates the extent to which current LLMs can capture task-oriented multi-party conversations (MPCs). We have recorded and transcribed 29 MPCs between patients, their companions, and a social robot in a hospital. We then annotated this corpus for multi-party goal-tracking and intent-slot recognition. People share goals, answer each other`s goals, and provide other people`s goals in MPCs - none of which occur in dyadic interactions. To understand user goals in MPCs, we compared three methods in zero-shot and few-shot settings: we fine-tuned T5, created pre-training tasks to train DialogLM using LED, and employed prompt engineering techniques with GPT-3.5-turbo, to determine which approach can complete this novel task with limited data. GPT-3.5-turbo significantly outperformed the others in a few-shot setting. The {\textquoteleft}reasoning' style prompt, when given 7{\%} of the corpus as example annotated conversations, was the best performing method. It correctly annotated 62.32{\%} of the goal tracking MPCs, and 69.57{\%} of the intent-slot recognition MPCs. A {\textquoteleft}story' style prompt increased model hallucination, which could be detrimental if deployed in safety-critical settings. We conclude that multi-party conversations still challenge state-of-the-art LLMs.
ChatGPT vs. Crowdsourcing vs. Experts: Annotating Open-Domain Conversations with Speech Functions (2023)

This paper deals with the task of annotating open-domain conversations with speech functions. We propose a semi-automated method for annotating dialogs following the topic-oriented, multi-layered taxonomy of speech functions with the use of hierarchical guidelines using Large Language Models. These guidelines comprise simple questions about the topic and speaker change, sentence types, pragmatic aspects of the utterance, and examples that aid untrained annotators in understanding the taxonomy. We compare the results of dialog annotation performed by experts, crowdsourcing workers, and ChatGPT. To improve the performance of ChatGPT, several experiments utilising different prompt engineering techniques were conducted. We demonstrate that in some cases large language models can achieve human-like performance following a multi-step tree-like annotation pipeline on complex discourse annotation, which is usually challenging and costly in terms of time and money when performed by humans.
DiactTOD: Learning Generalizable Latent Dialogue Acts for Controllable Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems (2023)

Dialogue act annotations are important to improve response generation quality in task-oriented dialogue systems. However, it can be challenging to use dialogue acts to control response generation in a generalizable way because different datasets and tasks may have incompatible annotations. While alternative methods that utilize latent action spaces or reinforcement learning do not require explicit annotations, they may lack interpretability or face difficulties defining task-specific rewards. In this work, we present a novel end-to-end latent dialogue act model (DiactTOD) that represents dialogue acts in a latent space. DiactTOD, when pre-trained on a large corpus, is able to predict and control dialogue acts to generate controllable responses using these latent representations in a zero-shot fashion. Our approach demonstrates state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of experimental settings on the MultiWOZ dataset, including zero-shot, few-shot, and full data fine-tuning with both end-to-end and policy optimization configurations.
Approximating Online Human Evaluation of Social Chatbots with Prompting (2023)

With conversational models becoming increasingly available to the general public, developing scalable and robust evaluation metrics is crucial to minimize potential social and psychological risks for the users. Existing evaluation metrics aim to automate offline user evaluation and approximate human judgment of pre-curated dialogs. However, they are limited in their ability to capture subjective perceptions of users who actually interact with the chatbots and might not generalize to real-world settings. To address this limitation, we propose an approach to approximate online human evaluation, leveraging large language models (LLMs) from the GPT-family. We introduce a new Dialog system Evaluation framework based on Prompting (DEP), which enables a fully automatic evaluation pipeline that replicates live user studies and achieves an impressive correlation with human judgment (up to Pearson r=0.95 on a system level). The DEP approach involves collecting synthetic chat logs of evaluated bots with an LLM in the other-play setting, where the LLM is carefully conditioned to follow a specific scenario. We further explore different prompting approaches to produce evaluation scores with the same LLM. The best-performing prompts, which contain few-shot demonstrations and instructions, show outstanding performance on the tested dataset and demonstrate the ability to generalize to other dialog corpora.
Dialogue Response Generation Using Completion of Omitted Predicate Arguments Based on Zero Anaphora Resolution (2023)

Human conversation attempts to build common ground consisting of shared beliefs, knowledge, and perceptions that form the premise for understanding utterances. Recent deep learning-based dialogue systems use human dialogue data to train a mapping from a dialogue history to responses, but common ground not directly expressed in words makes it difficult to generate coherent responses by learning statistical patterns alone. We propose Dialogue Completion using Zero Anaphora Resolution (DCZAR), a framework that explicitly completes omitted information in the dialogue history and generates responses from the completed dialogue history. In this study, we conducted automatic and human evaluations by applying several pretraining methods and datasets in Japanese in various combinations. Experimental results show that the DCZAR framework contributes to the generation of more coherent and engaging responses.