ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Semantic-based Pre-training for Dialogue Understanding (2022)

Pre-trained language models have made great progress on dialogue tasks. However, these models are typically trained on surface dialogue text, thus are proven to be weak in understanding the main semantic meaning of a dialogue context. We investigate Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) as explicit semantic knowledge for pre-training models to capture the core semantic information in dialogues during pre-training. In particular, we propose a semantic-based pre-training framework that extends the standard pre-training framework (Devlin et al.,2019) by three tasks for learning 1) core semantic units, 2) semantic relations and 3) the overall semantic representation according to AMR graphs. Experiments on the understanding of both chit-chats and task-oriented dialogues show the superiority of our model. To our knowledge, we are the first to leverage a deep semantic representation for dialogue pre-training.
Distribution Calibration for Out-of-Domain Detection with Bayesian Approximation (2022)

Out-of-Domain (OOD) detection is a key component in a task-oriented dialog system, which aims to identify whether a query falls outside the predefined supported intent set. Previous softmax-based detection algorithms are proved to be overconfident for OOD samples. In this paper, we analyze overconfident OOD comes from distribution uncertainty due to the mismatch between the training and test distributions, which makes the model can`t confidently make predictions thus probably causes abnormal softmax scores. We propose a Bayesian OOD detection framework to calibrate distribution uncertainty using Monte-Carlo Dropout. Our method is flexible and easily pluggable to existing softmax-based baselines and gains 33.33{\%} OOD F1 improvements with increasing only 0.41{\%} inference time compared to MSP. Further analyses show the effectiveness of Bayesian learning for OOD detection.
Tracking Satisfaction States for Customer Satisfaction Prediction in E-commerce Service Chatbots (2022)

Due to the increasing use of service chatbots in E-commerce platforms in recent years, customer satisfaction prediction (CSP) is gaining more and more attention. CSP is dedicated to evaluating subjective customer satisfaction in conversational service and thus helps improve customer service experience. However, previous methods focus on modeling customer-chatbot interaction across different turns, which are hard to represent the important dynamic satisfaction states throughout the customer journey. In this work, we investigate the problem of satisfaction states tracking and its effects on CSP in E-commerce service chatbots. To this end, we propose a dialogue-level classification model named DialogueCSP to track satisfaction states for CSP. In particular, we explore a novel two-step interaction module to represent the dynamic satisfaction states at each turn. In order to capture dialogue-level satisfaction states for CSP, we further introduce dialogue-aware attentions to integrate historical informative cues into the interaction module. To evaluate the proposed approach, we also build a Chinese E-commerce dataset for CSP. Experiment results demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms multiple baselines, illustrating the benefits of satisfaction states tracking on CSP.
Towards Multi-label Unknown Intent Detection (2022)

Multi-class unknown intent detection has made remarkable progress recently. However, it has a strong assumption that each utterance has only one intent, which does not conform to reality because utterances often have multiple intents. In this paper, we propose a more desirable task, multi-label unknown intent detection, to detect whether the utterance contains the unknown intent, in which each utterance may contain multiple intents. In this task, the unique utterances simultaneously containing known and unknown intents make existing multi-class methods easy to fail. To address this issue, we propose an intuitive and effective method to recognize whether All Intents contained in the utterance are Known (AIK). Our high-level idea is to predict the utterance`s intent number, then check whether the utterance contains the same number of known intents. If the number of known intents is less than the number of intents, it implies that the utterance also contains unknown intents. We benchmark AIK over existing methods, and empirical results suggest that our method obtains state-of-the-art performances. For example, on the MultiWOZ 2.3 dataset, AIK significantly reduces the FPR95 by 12.25{\%} compared to the best baseline.
Pan More Gold from the Sand: Refining Open-domain Dialogue Training with Noisy Self-Retrieval Generation (2022)

Real human conversation data are complicated, heterogeneous, and noisy, from which building open-domain dialogue systems remains a challenging task. In fact, such dialogue data still contains a wealth of information and knowledge, however, they are not fully explored. In this paper, we show existing open-domain dialogue generation methods that memorize context-response paired data with autoregressive or encode-decode language models underutilize the training data. Different from current approaches, using external knowledge, we explore a retrieval-generation training framework that can take advantage of the heterogeneous and noisy training data by considering them as {\textquotedblleft}evidence{\textquotedblright}. In particular, we use BERTScore for retrieval, which gives better qualities of the evidence and generation. Experiments over publicly available datasets demonstrate that our method can help models generate better responses, even such training data are usually impressed as low-quality data. Such performance gain is comparable with those improved by enlarging the training set, even better. We also found that the model performance has a positive correlation with the relevance of the retrieved evidence. Moreover, our method performed well on zero-shot experiments, which indicates that our method can be more robust to real-world data.
MulZDG: Multilingual Code-Switching Framework for Zero-shot Dialogue Generation (2022)

Building dialogue generation systems in a zero-shot scenario remains a huge challenge, since the typical zero-shot approaches in dialogue generation rely heavily on large-scale pre-trained language generation models such as GPT-3 and T5. The research on zero-shot dialogue generation without cumbersome language models is limited due to lacking corresponding parallel dialogue corpora. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective Multilingual learning framework for Zero-shot Dialogue Generation (dubbed as MulZDG) that can effectively transfer knowledge from an English corpus with large-scale training samples to a non-English corpus with zero samples. Besides, MulZDG can be viewed as a multilingual data augmentation method to improve the performance of the resource-rich language. First, we construct multilingual code-switching dialogue datasets via translation utterances randomly selected from monolingual English datasets. Then we employ MulZDG to train a unified multilingual dialogue model based on the code-switching datasets. The MulZDG can conduct implicit semantic alignment between different languages. Experiments on DailyDialog and DSTC7 datasets demonstrate that MulZDG not only achieve competitive performance under zero-shot case compared to training with sufficient examples but also greatly improve the performance of the source language.
Target-Guided Open-Domain Conversation Planning (2022)

Prior studies addressing target-oriented conversational tasks lack a crucial notion that has been intensively studied in the context of goal-oriented artificial intelligence agents, namely, planning. In this study, we propose the task of Target-Guided Open-Domain Conversation Planning (TGCP) task to evaluate whether neural conversational agents have goal-oriented conversation planning abilities. Using the TGCP task, we investigate the conversation planning abilities of existing retrieval models and recent strong generative models. The experimental results reveal the challenges facing current technology.
Does GPT-3 Generate Empathetic Dialogues? A Novel In-Context Example Selection Method and Automatic Evaluation Metric for Empathetic Dialogue Generation (2022)

Since empathy plays a crucial role in increasing social bonding between people, many studies have designed their own dialogue agents to be empathetic using the well-established method of fine-tuning. However, they do not use prompt-based in-context learning, which has shown powerful performance in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, for empathetic dialogue generation. Although several studies have investigated few-shot in-context learning for empathetic dialogue generation, an in-depth analysis of the generation of empathetic dialogue with in-context learning remains unclear, especially in GPT-3 (Brown et al., 2020). In this study, we explore whether GPT-3 can generate empathetic dialogues through prompt-based in-context learning in both zero-shot and few-shot settings. To enhance performance, we propose two new in-context example selection methods, called SITSM and EMOSITSM, that utilize emotion and situational information. We also introduce a new automatic evaluation method, DIFF-EPITOME, which reflects the human tendency to express empathy. From the analysis, we reveal that our DIFF-EPITOME is effective in measuring the degree of human empathy. We show that GPT-3 achieves competitive performance with Blender 90M, a state-of-the-art dialogue generative model, on both automatic and human evaluation. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/passing2961/EmpGPT-3}.
DialogueEIN: Emotion Interaction Network for Dialogue Affective Analysis (2022)

Emotion Recognition in Conversation (ERC) has attracted increasing attention in the affective computing research field. Previous works have mainly focused on modeling the semantic interactions in the dialogue and implicitly inferring the evolution of the speakers' emotional states. Few works have considered the emotional interactions, which directly reflect the emotional evolution of speakers in the dialogue. According to psychological and behavioral studies, the emotional inertia and emotional stimulus are important factors that affect the speaker`s emotional state in conversations. In this work, we propose a novel Dialogue Emotion Interaction Network, DialogueEIN, to explicitly model the intra-speaker, inter-speaker, global and local emotional interactions to respectively simulate the emotional inertia, emotional stimulus, global and local emotional evolution in dialogues. Extensive experiments on four ERC benchmark datasets, IEMOCAP, MELD, EmoryNLP and DailyDialog, show that our proposed DialogueEIN considering emotional interaction factors can achieve superior or competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art methods. Our codes and models are released.
Towards Enhancing Health Coaching Dialogue in Low-Resource Settings (2022)

Health coaching helps patients identify and accomplish lifestyle-related goals, effectively improving the control of chronic diseases and mitigating mental health conditions. However, health coaching is cost-prohibitive due to its highly personalized and labor-intensive nature. In this paper, we propose to build a dialogue system that converses with the patients, helps them create and accomplish specific goals, and can address their emotions with empathy. However, building such a system is challenging since real-world health coaching datasets are limited and empathy is subtle. Thus, we propose a modularized health coaching dialogue with simplified NLU and NLG frameworks combined with mechanism-conditioned empathetic response generation. Through automatic and human evaluation, we show that our system generates more empathetic, fluent, and coherent responses and outperforms the state-of-the-art in NLU tasks while requiring less annotation. We view our approach as a key step towards building automated and more accessible health coaching systems.
Generalized Intent Discovery: Learning from Open World Dialogue System (2022)

Traditional intent classification models are based on a pre-defined intent set and only recognize limited in-domain (IND) intent classes. But users may input out-of-domain (OOD) queries in a practical dialogue system. Such OOD queries can provide directions for future improvement. In this paper, we define a new task, Generalized Intent Discovery (GID), which aims to extend an IND intent classifier to an open-world intent set including IND and OOD intents. We hope to simultaneously classify a set of labeled IND intent classes while discovering and recognizing new unlabeled OOD types incrementally. We construct three public datasets for different application scenarios and propose two kinds of frameworks, pipeline-based and end-to-end for future work. Further, we conduct exhaustive experiments and qualitative analysis to comprehend key challenges and provide new guidance for future GID research.
DialMed: A Dataset for Dialogue-based Medication Recommendation (2022)

Medication recommendation is a crucial task for intelligent healthcare systems. Previous studies mainly recommend medications with electronic health records (EHRs). However, some details of interactions between doctors and patients may be ignored or omitted in EHRs, which are essential for automatic medication recommendation. Therefore, we make the first attempt to recommend medications with the conversations between doctors and patients. In this work, we construct DIALMED, the first high-quality dataset for medical dialogue-based medication recommendation task. It contains 11, 996 medical dialogues related to 16 common diseases from 3 departments and 70 corresponding common medications. Furthermore, we propose a Dialogue structure and Disease knowledge aware Network (DDN), where a QA Dialogue Graph mechanism is designed to model the dialogue structure and the knowledge graph is used to introduce external disease knowledge. The extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is a promising solution to recommend medications with medical dialogues. The dataset and code are available at \url{https://github.com/f-window/DialMed}.
Speaker Clustering in Textual Dialogue with Pairwise Utterance Relation and Cross-corpus Dialogue Act Supervision (2022)

We propose a speaker clustering model for textual dialogues, which groups the utterances of a multi-party dialogue without speaker annotations, so that the actual speakers are identical inside each cluster. We find that, without knowing the speakers, the interactions between utterances are still implied in the text, which suggest the relations between speakers. In this work, we model the semantic content of utterance with a pre-trained language model, and the relations between speakers with an utterance-level pairwise matrix. The semantic content representation can be further instructed by cross-corpus dialogue act modeling. The speaker labels are finally generated by spectral clustering. Experiments show that our model outperforms the sequence classification baseline, and benefits from the auxiliary dialogue act classification task. We also discuss the detail of determining the number of speakers (clusters), eliminating the interference caused by semantic similarity, and the impact of utterance distance.
TopKG: Target-oriented Dialog via Global Planning on Knowledge Graph (2022)

Target-oriented dialog aims to reach a global target through multi-turn conversation. The key to the task is the global planning towards the target, which flexibly guides the dialog concerning the context. However, existing target-oriented dialog works take a local and greedy strategy for response generation, where global planning is absent. In this work, we propose global planning for target-oriented dialog on a commonsense knowledge graph (KG). We design a global reinforcement learning with the planned paths to flexibly adjust the local response generation model towards the global target. We also propose a KG-based method to collect target-oriented samples automatically from the chit-chat corpus for model training. Experiments show that our method can reach the target with a higher success rate, fewer turns, and more coherent responses.
Extractive Summarisation for German-language Data: A Text-level Approach with Discourse Features (2022)

We examine the link between facets of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) and the selection of content for extractive summarisation, for German-language texts. For this purpose, we produce a set of extractive summaries for a dataset of German-language newspaper commentaries, a corpus which already has several layers of annotation. We provide an in-depth analysis of the connection between summary sentences and several RST-based features and transfer these insights to various automated summarisation models. Our results show that RST features are informative for the task of extractive summarisation, particularly nuclearity and relations at sentence-level.
End-to-End Neural Bridging Resolution (2022)

The state of bridging resolution research is rather unsatisfactory: not only are state-of-the-art resolvers evaluated in unrealistic settings, but the neural models underlying these resolvers are weaker than those used for entity coreference resolution. In light of these problems, we evaluate bridging resolvers in an end-to-end setting, strengthen them with better encoders, and attempt to gain a better understanding of them via perturbation experiments and a manual analysis of their outputs.
Investigating the Performance of Transformer-Based NLI Models on Presuppositional Inferences (2022)

Presuppositions are assumptions that are taken for granted by an utterance, and identifying them is key to a pragmatic interpretation of language. In this paper, we investigate the capabilities of transformer models to perform NLI on cases involving presupposition. First, we present simple heuristics to create alternative {\textquotedblleft}contrastive{\textquotedblright} test cases based on the ImpPres dataset and investigate the model performance on those test cases. Second, to better understand how the model is making its predictions, we analyze samples from sub-datasets of ImpPres and examine model performance on them. Overall, our findings suggest that NLI-trained transformer models seem to be exploiting specific structural and lexical cues as opposed to performing some kind of pragmatic reasoning.
Re-Examining FactBank: Predicting the Author`s Presentation of Factuality (2022)

We present a corrected version of a subset of the FactBank data set. Previously published results on FactBank are no longer valid. We perform experiments on FactBank using multiple training paradigms, data smoothing techniques, and polarity classifiers. We argue that f-measure is an important alternative evaluation metric for factuality. We provide new state-of-the-art results for four corpora including FactBank. We perform an error analysis on Factbank combined with two similar corpora.
The Role of Context and Uncertainty in Shallow Discourse Parsing (2022)

Discourse parsing has proven to be useful for a number of NLP tasks that require complex reasoning. However, over a decade since the advent of the Penn Discourse Treebank, predicting implicit discourse relations in text remains challenging. There are several possible reasons for this, and we hypothesize that models should be exposed to more context as it plays an important role in accurate human annotation; meanwhile adding uncertainty measures can improve model accuracy and calibration. To thoroughly investigate this phenomenon, we perform a series of experiments to determine 1) the effects of context on human judgments, and 2) the effect of quantifying uncertainty with annotator confidence ratings on model accuracy and calibration (which we measure using the Brier score (Brier et al, 1950)). We find that including annotator accuracy and confidence improves model accuracy, and incorporating confidence in the model`s temperature function can lead to models with significantly better-calibrated confidence measures. We also find some insightful qualitative results regarding human and model behavior on these datasets.
Improving Commonsense Contingent Reasoning by Pseudo-data and Its Application to the Related Tasks (2022)

Contingent reasoning is one of the essential abilities in natural language understanding, and many language resources annotated with contingent relations have been constructed. However, despite the recent advances in deep learning, the task of contingent reasoning is still difficult for computers. In this study, we focus on the reasoning of contingent relation between basic events. Based on the existing data construction method, we automatically generate large-scale pseudo-problems and incorporate the generated data into training. We also investigate the generality of contingent knowledge through quantitative evaluation by performing transfer learning on the related tasks: discourse relation analysis, the Japanese Winograd Schema Challenge, and the JCommonsenseQA. The experimental results show the effectiveness of utilizing pseudo-problems for both the commonsense contingent reasoning task and the related tasks, which suggests the importance of contingent reasoning.
A Survey in Automatic Irony Processing: Linguistic, Cognitive, and Multi-X Perspectives (2022)

Irony is a ubiquitous figurative language in daily communication. Previously, many researchers have approached irony from linguistic, cognitive science, and computational aspects. Recently, some progress have been witnessed in automatic irony processing due to the rapid development in deep neural models in natural language processing (NLP). In this paper, we will provide a comprehensive overview of computational irony, insights from linguisic theory and cognitive science, as well as its interactions with downstream NLP tasks and newly proposed multi-X irony processing perspectives.
Towards Identifying Alternative-Lexicalization Signals of Discourse Relations (2022)

The task of shallow discourse parsing in the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB) framework has traditionally been restricted to identifying those relations that are signaled by a discourse connective ({\textquotedblleft}explicit{\textquotedblright}) and those that have no signal at all ({\textquotedblleft}implicit{\textquotedblright}). The third type, the more flexible group of {\textquotedblleft}AltLex{\textquotedblright} realizations has been neglected because of its small amount of occurrences in the PDTB2 corpus. Their number has grown significantly in the recent PDTB3, and in this paper, we present the first approaches for recognizing these {\textquotedblleft}alternative lexicalizations{\textquotedblright}. We compare the performance of a pattern-based approach and a sequence labeling model, add an experiment on the pre-classification of candidate sentences, and provide an initial qualitative analysis of the error cases made by both models.
Topicalization in Language Models: A Case Study on Japanese (2022)

Humans use different wordings depending on the context to facilitate efficient communication. For example, instead of completely new information, information related to the preceding context is typically placed at the sentence-initial position. In this study, we analyze whether neural language models (LMs) can capture such discourse-level preferences in text generation. Specifically, we focus on a particular aspect of discourse, namely the topic-comment structure. To analyze the linguistic knowledge of LMs separately, we chose the Japanese language, a topic-prominent language, for designing probing tasks, and we created human topicalization judgment data by crowdsourcing. Our experimental results suggest that LMs have different generalizations from humans; LMs exhibited less context-dependent behaviors toward topicalization judgment. These results highlight the need for the additional inductive biases to guide LMs to achieve successful discourse-level generalization.