In this paper, we present our submission to the DialDoc shared task based on the MultiDoc2Dial dataset. MultiDoc2Dial is a conversational question answering dataset that grounds dialogues in multiple documents. The task involves grounding a user’s query in a document followed by generating an appropriate response. We propose several improvements over the baseline’s retriever-reader architecture to aid in modeling goal-oriented dialogues grounded in multiple documents. Our proposed approach employs sparse representations for passage retrieval, a passage re-ranker, the fusion-in-decoder architecture for generation, and a curriculum learning training paradigm. Our approach shows a 12 point improvement in BLEU score compared to the baseline RAG model.

Previous studies on question answering over knowledge graphs have typically operated over a single knowledge graph (KG). This KG is assumed to be known a priori and is lever- aged similarly for all users’ queries during inference. However, such an assumption is not applicable to real-world settings, such as health- care, where one needs to handle queries of new users over unseen KGs during inference. Furthermore, privacy concerns and high computational costs render it infeasible to query the single KG that has information about all users while answering a specific user’s query. The above concerns motivate our question answer- ing setting over personalized knowledge graphs (PERKGQA) where each user has restricted access to their KG. We observe that current state-of-the-art KGQA methods that require learning prior node representations fare poorly. We propose two complementary approaches, PATHCBR and PATHRGCN for PERKGQA. The former is a simple non-parametric technique that employs case-based reasoning, while the latter is a parametric approach using graph neural networks. Our proposed methods circumvent learning prior representations, can generalize to unseen KGs, and outperform strong baselines on an academic and an internal dataset by 6.5% and 10.5%.

Modelling persuasion strategies as predictors of task outcome has several real-world applications and has received considerable attention from the computational linguistics community. However, previous research has failed to account for the resisting strategies employed by an individual to foil such persuasion attempts. Grounded in prior literature in cognitive and social psychology, we propose a generalised framework for identifying resisting strategies in persuasive conversations. We instantiate our framework on two distinct datasets comprising persuasion and negotiation conversations. We also leverage a hierarchical sequence-labelling neural architecture to infer the aforementioned resisting strategies automatically. Our experiments reveal the asymmetry of power roles in non-collaborative goal-directed conversations and the benefits accrued from incorporating resisting strategies on the final conversation outcome. We also investigate the role of different resisting strategies on the conversation outcome and glean insights that corroborate with past findings. We also make the code and the dataset of this work publicly available at https://github.com/americast/resper.

In this paper, we discuss our submission for DialDoc subtask 1. The subtask requires systems to extract knowledge from FAQ-type documents vital to reply to a user’s query in a conversational setting. We experiment with pretraining a BERT-based question-answering model on different QA datasets from MRQA, as well as conversational QA datasets like CoQA and QuAC. Our results show that models pretrained on CoQA and QuAC perform better than their counterparts that are pretrained on MRQA datasets. Our results also indicate that adding more pretraining data does not necessarily result in improved performance. Our final model, which is an ensemble of AlBERT-XL pretrained on CoQA and QuAC independently, with the chosen answer having the highest average probability score, achieves an F1-Score of 70.9% on the official test-set.

The notion of face refers to the public self-image of an individual that emerges both from the individual’s own actions as well as from the interaction with others. Modeling face and understanding its state changes throughout a conversation is critical to the study of maintenance of basic human needs in and through interaction. Grounded in the politeness theory of Brown and Levinson (1978), we propose a generalized framework for modeling face acts in persuasion conversations, resulting in a reliable coding manual, an annotated corpus, and computational models. The framework reveals insights about differences in face act utilization between asymmetric roles in persuasion conversations. Using computational models, we are able to successfully identify face acts as well as predict a key conversational outcome (e.g. donation success). Finally, we model a latent representation of the conversational state to analyze the impact of predicted face acts on the probability of a positive conversational outcome and observe several correlations that corroborate previous findings.

Although a lot of research has been done on utilising Online Social Media during disasters, there exists no system for a specific task that is critical in a post-disaster scenario – identifying resource-needs and resource-availabilities in the disaster-affected region, coupled with their subsequent matching. To this end, we present NARMADA, a semi-automated platform which leverages the crowd-sourced information from social media posts for assisting post-disaster relief coordination efforts. The system employs Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval techniques for identifying resource-needs and resource-availabilities from microblogs, extracting resources from the posts, and also matching the needs to suitable availabilities. The system is thus capable of facilitating the judicious management of resources during post-disaster relief operations.

In this paper we describe our submission for the task of Propaganda Span Identification in news articles. We introduce a BERT-BiLSTM based span-level propaganda classification model that identifies which token spans within the sentence are indicative of propaganda. The ”multi-granular” model incorporates linguistic knowledge at various levels of text granularity, including word, sentence and document level syntactic, semantic and pragmatic affect features, which significantly improve model performance, compared to its language-agnostic variant. To facilitate better representation learning, we also collect a corpus of 10k news articles, and use it for fine-tuning the model. The final model is a majority-voting ensemble which learns different propaganda class boundaries by leveraging different subsets of incorporated knowledge.

We present CL Scholar, the ACL Anthology knowledge graph miner to facilitate high-quality search and exploration of current research progress in the computational linguistics community. In contrast to previous works, periodically crawling, indexing and processing of new incoming articles is completely automated in the current system. CL Scholar utilizes both textual and network information for knowledge graph construction. As an additional novel initiative, CL Scholar supports more than 1200 scholarly natural language queries along with standard keyword-based search on constructed knowledge graph. It answers binary, statistical and list based natural language queries. The current system is deployed at http://cnerg.iitkgp.ac.in/aclakg. We also provide REST API support along with bulk download facility. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/CLScholar.