With the development of pre-trained language models, remarkable success has been witnessed in dialogue understanding (DU). However, current DU approaches usually employ independent models for each distinct DU task, without considering shared knowledge across different DU tasks. In this paper, we propose a unified generative dialogue understanding framework, named UniDU, to achieve effective information exchange across diverse DU tasks. Here, we reformulate all DU tasks into a unified prompt-based generative model paradigm. More importantly, a novel model-agnostic multi-task training strategy (MATS) is introduced to dynamically adapt the weights of diverse tasks for best knowlege sharing during training, based on the nature and available data of each task. Experiments on ten DU datasets covering five fundamental DU tasks show that the proposed UniDU framework largely outperforms task-specific well-designed methods on all tasks. MATS also reveals the knowledge sharing structure of these tasks. Finally, UniDU obtains promising performance on unseen dialogue domain, showing great potential of generalization.

Paraphrase generation using deep learning has been a research hotspot of natural language processing in the past few years. While previous studies tackle the problem from different aspects, the essence of paraphrase generation is to retain the key semantics of the source sentence and rewrite the rest of the content. Inspired by this observation, we propose a novel two-stage model, PGKPR, for paraphrase generation with keyword and part-of-speech reconstruction. The rationale is to capture simultaneously the possible keywords of a source sentence and the relations between them to facilitate the rewriting. In the first stage, we identify the possible keywords using a prediction attribution technique, where the words obtaining higher attribution scores are more likely to be the keywords. In the second stage, we train a transformer-based model via multi-task learning for paraphrase generation. The novel learning task is the reconstruction of the keywords and part-of-speech tags, respectively, from a perturbed sequence of the source sentence. The learned encodings are then decoded to generate the paraphrase. We conduct the experiments on two commonly-used datasets, and demonstrate the superior performance of PGKPR over comparative models on multiple evaluation metrics.

Despite the continuing efforts to improve the engagingness and consistency of chit-chat dialogue systems, the majority of current work simply focus on mimicking human-like responses, leaving understudied the aspects of modeling understanding between interlocutors. The research in cognitive science, instead, suggests that understanding is an essential signal for a high-quality chit-chat conversation. Motivated by this, we propose Pˆ2 Bot, a transmitter-receiver based framework with the aim of explicitly modeling understanding. Specifically, Pˆ2 Bot incorporates mutual persona perception to enhance the quality of personalized dialogue generation. Experiments on a large public dataset, Persona-Chat, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, with a considerable boost over the state-of-the-art baselines across both automatic metrics and human evaluations.

Recent years the task of incomplete utterance rewriting has raised a large attention. Previous works usually shape it as a machine translation task and employ sequence to sequence based architecture with copy mechanism. In this paper, we present a novel and extensive approach, which formulates it as a semantic segmentation task. Instead of generating from scratch, such a formulation introduces edit operations and shapes the problem as prediction of a word-level edit matrix. Benefiting from being able to capture both local and global information, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on several public datasets. Furthermore, our approach is four times faster than the standard approach in inference.

In Natural Language Interfaces to Databases systems, the text-to-SQL technique allows users to query databases by using natural language questions. Though significant progress in this area has been made recently, most parsers may fall short when they are deployed in real systems. One main reason stems from the difficulty of fully understanding the users’ natural language questions. In this paper, we include human in the loop and present a novel parser-independent interactive approach (PIIA) that interacts with users using multi-choice questions and can easily work with arbitrary parsers. Experiments were conducted on two cross-domain datasets, the WikiSQL and the more complex Spider, with five state-of-the-art parsers. These demonstrated that PIIA is capable of enhancing the text-to-SQL performance with limited interaction turns by using both simulation and human evaluation.

One key component in text-to-SQL is to predict the comparison relations between columns and their values. To the best of our knowledge, no existing models explicitly introduce external common knowledge to address this problem, thus their capabilities of predicting comparison relations are limited beyond training data. In this paper, we propose to leverage adjective-noun phrasing knowledge mined from the web to predict the comparison relations in text-to-SQL. Experimental results on both the original and the re-split Spider dataset show that our approach achieves significant improvement over state-of-the-art methods on comparison relation prediction.

Context-dependent semantic parsing has proven to be an important yet challenging task. To leverage the advances in context-independent semantic parsing, we propose to perform follow-up query analysis, aiming to restate context-dependent natural language queries with contextual information. To accomplish the task, we propose STAR, a novel approach with a well-designed two-phase process. It is parser-independent and able to handle multifarious follow-up scenarios in different domains. Experiments on the FollowUp dataset show that STAR outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline by a large margin of nearly 8%. The superiority on parsing results verifies the feasibility of follow-up query analysis. We also explore the extensibility of STAR on the SQA dataset, which is very promising.