Amy Pavel


2021

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Controlling Dialogue Generation with Semantic Exemplars
Prakhar Gupta | Jeffrey Bigham | Yulia Tsvetkov | Amy Pavel
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Dialogue systems pretrained with large language models generate locally coherent responses, but lack fine-grained control over responses necessary to achieve specific goals. A promising method to control response generation is exemplar-based generation, in which models edit exemplar responses that are retrieved from training data, or hand-written to strategically address discourse-level goals, to fit new dialogue contexts. We present an Exemplar-based Dialogue Generation model, EDGE, that uses the semantic frames present in exemplar responses to guide response generation. We show that controlling dialogue generation based on the semantic frames of exemplars improves the coherence of generated responses, while preserving semantic meaning and conversation goals present in exemplar responses.

2019

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Investigating Evaluation of Open-Domain Dialogue Systems With Human Generated Multiple References
Prakhar Gupta | Shikib Mehri | Tiancheng Zhao | Amy Pavel | Maxine Eskenazi | Jeffrey Bigham
Proceedings of the 20th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue

The aim of this paper is to mitigate the shortcomings of automatic evaluation of open-domain dialog systems through multi-reference evaluation. Existing metrics have been shown to correlate poorly with human judgement, particularly in open-domain dialog. One alternative is to collect human annotations for evaluation, which can be expensive and time consuming. To demonstrate the effectiveness of multi-reference evaluation, we augment the test set of DailyDialog with multiple references. A series of experiments show that the use of multiple references results in improved correlation between several automatic metrics and human judgement for both the quality and the diversity of system output.