Automatic transfer of text between domains has become popular in recent times. One of its aims is to preserve the semantic content while adapting to the target domain. However, it does not explicitly maintain other attributes between the source and translated text: e.g., text length and descriptiveness. Maintaining constraints in transfer has several downstream applications, including data augmentation and debiasing. We introduce a method for such constrained unsupervised text style transfer by introducing two complementary losses to the generative adversarial network (GAN) family of models. Unlike the competing losses used in GANs, we introduce cooperative losses where the discriminator and the generator cooperate and reduce the same loss. The first is a contrastive loss and the second is a classification loss — aiming to regularize the latent space further and bring similar sentences closer together. We demonstrate that such training retains lexical, syntactic and domain-specific constraints between domains for multiple benchmark datasets, including ones where more than one attribute change. We show that the complementary cooperative losses improve text quality, according to both automated and human evaluation measures.

In this paper, we study the effect of commonsense and domain knowledge while generating responses in counseling conversations using retrieval and generative methods for knowledge integration. We propose a pipeline that collects domain knowledge through web mining, and show that retrieval from both domain-specific and commonsense knowledge bases improves the quality of generated responses. We also present a model that incorporates knowledge generated by COMET using soft positional encoding and masked self-attention.We show that both retrieved and COMET-generated knowledge improve the system’s performance as measured by automatic metrics and also by human evaluation. Lastly, we present a comparative study on the types of knowledge encoded by our system showing that causal and intentional relationships benefit the generation task more than other types of commonsense relations.

This paper addresses the problem of dialogue reasoning with contextualized commonsense inference. We curate CICERO, a dataset of dyadic conversations with five types of utterance-level reasoning-based inferences: cause, subsequent event, prerequisite, motivation, and emotional reaction. The dataset contains 53,105 of such inferences from 5,672 dialogues. We use this dataset to solve relevant generative and discriminative tasks: generation of cause and subsequent event; generation of prerequisite, motivation, and listener’s emotional reaction; and selection of plausible alternatives. Our results ascertain the value of such dialogue-centric commonsense knowledge datasets. It is our hope that CICERO will open new research avenues into commonsense-based dialogue reasoning.

Despite the importance of relation extraction in building and representing knowledge, less research is focused on generalizing to unseen relations types. We introduce the task setting of Zero-Shot Relation Triplet Extraction (ZeroRTE) to encourage further research in low-resource relation extraction methods. Given an input sentence, each extracted triplet consists of the head entity, relation label, and tail entity where the relation label is not seen at the training stage. To solve ZeroRTE, we propose to synthesize relation examples by prompting language models to generate structured texts. Concretely, we unify language model prompts and structured text approaches to design a structured prompt template for generating synthetic relation samples when conditioning on relation label prompts (RelationPrompt). To overcome the limitation for extracting multiple relation triplets in a sentence, we design a novel Triplet Search Decoding method. Experiments on FewRel and Wiki-ZSL datasets show the efficacy of RelationPrompt for the ZeroRTE task and zero-shot relation classification. Our code and data are available at github.com/declare-lab/RelationPrompt.

This paper proposes a simple yet effective interpolation-based data augmentation approach termed DoubleMix, to improve the robustness of models in text classification. DoubleMix first leverages a couple of simple augmentation operations to generate several perturbed samples for each training data, and then uses the perturbed data and original data to carry out a two-step interpolation in the hidden space of neural models. Concretely, it first mixes up the perturbed data to a synthetic sample and then mixes up the original data and the synthetic perturbed data. DoubleMix enhances models’ robustness by learning the “shifted” features in hidden space. On six text classification benchmark datasets, our approach outperforms several popular text augmentation methods including token-level, sentence-level, and hidden-level data augmentation techniques. Also, experiments in low-resource settings show our approach consistently improves models’ performance when the training data is scarce. Extensive ablation studies and case studies confirm that each component of our approach contributes to the final performance and show that our approach exhibits superior performance on challenging counterexamples. Additionally, visual analysis shows that text features generated by our approach are highly interpretable.

We propose a new approach, Knowledge Distillation using Optimal Transport (KNOT), to distill the natural language semantic knowledge from multiple teacher networks to a student network. KNOT aims to train a (global) student model by learning to minimize the optimal transport cost of its assigned probability distribution over the labels to the weighted sum of probabilities predicted by the (local) teacher models, under the constraints that the student model does not have access to teacher models’ parameters or training data. To evaluate the quality of knowledge transfer, we introduce a new metric, Semantic Distance (SD), that measures semantic closeness between the predicted and ground truth label distributions. The proposed method shows improvements in the global model’s SD performance over the baseline across three NLP tasks while performing on par with Entropy-based distillation on standard accuracy and F1 metrics. The implementation pertaining to this work is publicly available at https://github.com/declare-lab/KNOT.

With the boom of e-commerce, Multimodal Review Helpfulness Prediction (MRHP) that identifies the helpfulness score of multimodal product reviews has become a research hotspot. Previous work on this task focuses on attention-based modality fusion, information integration, and relation modeling, which primarily exposes the following drawbacks: 1) the model may fail to capture the really essential information due to its indiscriminate attention formulation; 2) lack appropriate modeling methods that takes full advantage of correlation among provided data. In this paper, we propose SANCL: Selective Attention and Natural Contrastive Learning for MRHP. SANCL adopts a probe-based strategy to enforce high attention weights on the regions of greater significance. It also constructs a contrastive learning framework based on natural matching properties in the dataset. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets with three categories show that SANCL achieves state-of-the-art baseline performance with lower memory consumption.

Building robust multimodal models are crucial for achieving reliable deployment in the wild. Despite its importance, less attention has been paid to identifying and improving the robustness of Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) models. In this work, we hope to address that by (i) Proposing simple diagnostic checks for modality robustness in a trained multimodal model. Using these checks, we find MSA models to be highly sensitive to a single modality, which creates issues in their robustness; (ii) We analyze well-known robust training strategies to alleviate the issues. Critically, we observe that robustness can be achieved without compromising on the original performance. We hope our extensive study–performed across five models and two benchmark datasets–and proposed procedures would make robustness an integral component in MSA research. Our diagnostic checks and robust training solutions are simple to implement and available at https://github.com/declare-lab/MSA-Robustness

Commonsense inference to understand and explain human language is a fundamental research problem in natural language processing. Explaining human conversations poses a great challenge as it requires contextual understanding, planning, inference, and several aspects of reasoning including causal, temporal, and commonsense reasoning. In this work, we introduce CIDER – a manually curated dataset that contains dyadic dialogue explanations in the form of implicit and explicit knowledge triplets inferred using contextual commonsense inference. Extracting such rich explanations from conversations can be conducive to improving several downstream applications. The annotated triplets are categorized by the type of commonsense knowledge present (e.g., causal, conditional, temporal). We set up three different tasks conditioned on the annotated dataset: Dialogue-level Natural Language Inference, Span Extraction, and Multi-choice Span Selection. Baseline results obtained with transformer-based models reveal that the tasks are difficult, paving the way for promising future research. The dataset and the baseline implementations are publicly available at https://github.com/declare-lab/CIDER.

Human communication is multimodal in nature; it is through multiple modalities such as language, voice, and facial expressions, that opinions and emotions are expressed. Data in this domain exhibits complex multi-relational and temporal interactions. Learning from this data is a fundamentally challenging research problem. In this paper, we propose Modal-Temporal Attention Graph (MTAG). MTAG is an interpretable graph-based neural model that provides a suitable framework for analyzing multimodal sequential data. We first introduce a procedure to convert unaligned multimodal sequence data into a graph with heterogeneous nodes and edges that captures the rich interactions across modalities and through time. Then, a novel graph fusion operation, called MTAG fusion, along with a dynamic pruning and read-out technique, is designed to efficiently process this modal-temporal graph and capture various interactions. By learning to focus only on the important interactions within the graph, MTAG achieves state-of-the-art performance on multimodal sentiment analysis and emotion recognition benchmarks, while utilizing significantly fewer model parameters.

Scarcity of annotated causal texts leads to poor robustness when training state-of-the-art language models for causal sentence classification. In particular, we found that models misclassify on augmented sentences that have been negated or strengthened with respect to its causal meaning. This is worrying since minor linguistic differences in causal sentences can have disparate meanings. Therefore, we propose the generation of counterfactual causal sentences by creating contrast sets (Gardner et al., 2020) to be included during model training. We experimented on two model architectures and predicted on two out-of-domain corpora. While our strengthening schemes proved useful in improving model performance, for negation, regular edits were insufficient. Thus, we also introduce heuristics like shortening or multiplying root words of a sentence. By including a mixture of edits when training, we achieved performance improvements beyond the baseline across both models, and within and out of corpus’ domain, suggesting that our proposed augmentation can also help models generalize.

Distantly supervised models are very popular for relation extraction since we can obtain a large amount of training data using the distant supervision method without human annotation. In distant supervision, a sentence is considered as a source of a tuple if the sentence contains both entities of the tuple. However, this condition is too permissive and does not guarantee the presence of relevant relation-specific information in the sentence. As such, distantly supervised training data contains much noise which adversely affects the performance of the models. In this paper, we propose a self-ensemble filtering mechanism to filter out the noisy samples during the training process. We evaluate our proposed framework on the New York Times dataset which is obtained via distant supervision. Our experiments with multiple state-of-the-art neural relation extraction models show that our proposed filtering mechanism improves the robustness of the models and increases their F1 scores.

Interpretability is an important aspect of the trustworthiness of a model’s predictions. Transformer’s predictions are widely explained by the attention weights, i.e., a probability distribution generated at its self-attention unit (head). Current empirical studies provide shreds of evidence that attention weights are not explanations by proving that they are not unique. A recent study showed theoretical justifications to this observation by proving the non-identifiability of attention weights. For a given input to a head and its output, if the attention weights generated in it are unique, we call the weights identifiable. In this work, we provide deeper theoretical analysis and empirical observations on the identifiability of attention weights. Ignored in the previous works, we find the attention weights are more identifiable than we currently perceive by uncovering the hidden role of the key vector. However, the weights are still prone to be non-unique attentions that make them unfit for interpretation. To tackle this issue, we provide a variant of the encoder layer that decouples the relationship between key and value vector and provides identifiable weights up to the desired length of the input. We prove the applicability of such variations by providing empirical justifications on varied text classification tasks. The implementations are available at https://github.com/declare-lab/identifiable-transformers.

Sentence order prediction is the task of finding the correct order of sentences in a randomly ordered document. Correctly ordering the sentences requires an understanding of coherence with respect to the chronological sequence of events described in the text. Document-level contextual understanding and commonsense knowledge centered around these events are often essential in uncovering this coherence and predicting the exact chronological order. In this paper, we introduce STaCK — a framework based on graph neural networks and temporal commonsense knowledge to model global information and predict the relative order of sentences. Our graph network accumulates temporal evidence using knowledge of ‘past’ and ‘future’ and formulates sentence ordering as a constrained edge classification problem. We report results on five different datasets, and empirically show that the proposed method is naturally suitable for order prediction. The implementation of this work is available at: https://github.com/declare-lab/sentence-ordering.

In multimodal sentiment analysis (MSA), the performance of a model highly depends on the quality of synthesized embeddings. These embeddings are generated from the upstream process called multimodal fusion, which aims to extract and combine the input unimodal raw data to produce a richer multimodal representation. Previous work either back-propagates the task loss or manipulates the geometric property of feature spaces to produce favorable fusion results, which neglects the preservation of critical task-related information that flows from input to the fusion results. In this work, we propose a framework named MultiModal InfoMax (MMIM), which hierarchically maximizes the Mutual Information (MI) in unimodal input pairs (inter-modality) and between multimodal fusion result and unimodal input in order to maintain task-related information through multimodal fusion. The framework is jointly trained with the main task (MSA) to improve the performance of the downstream MSA task. To address the intractable issue of MI bounds, we further formulate a set of computationally simple parametric and non-parametric methods to approximate their truth value. Experimental results on the two widely used datasets demonstrate the efficacy of our approach.

Cross-domain sentiment analysis has received significant attention in recent years, prompted by the need to combat the domain gap between different applications that make use of sentiment analysis. In this paper, we take a novel perspective on this task by exploring the role of external commonsense knowledge. We introduce a new framework, KinGDOM, which utilizes the ConceptNet knowledge graph to enrich the semantics of a document by providing both domain-specific and domain-general background concepts. These concepts are learned by training a graph convolutional autoencoder that leverages inter-domain concepts in a domain-invariant manner. Conditioning a popular domain-adversarial baseline method with these learned concepts helps improve its performance over state-of-the-art approaches, demonstrating the efficacy of our proposed framework.

Modeling multimodal language is a core research area in natural language processing. While languages such as English have relatively large multimodal language resources, other widely spoken languages across the globe have few or no large-scale datasets in this area. This disproportionately affects native speakers of languages other than English. As a step towards building more equitable and inclusive multimodal systems, we introduce the first large-scale multimodal language dataset for Spanish, Portuguese, German and French. The proposed dataset, called CMU-MOSEAS (CMU Multimodal Opinion Sentiment, Emotions and Attributes), is the largest of its kind with 40,000 total labelled sentences. It covers a diverse set topics and speakers, and carries supervision of 20 labels including sentiment (and subjectivity), emotions, and attributes. Our evaluations on a state-of-the-art multimodal model demonstrates that CMU-MOSEAS enables further research for multilingual studies in multimodal language.

Current approaches to empathetic response generation view the set of emotions expressed in the input text as a flat structure, where all the emotions are treated uniformly. We argue that empathetic responses often mimic the emotion of the user to a varying degree, depending on its positivity or negativity and content. We show that the consideration of these polarity-based emotion clusters and emotional mimicry results in improved empathy and contextual relevance of the response as compared to the state-of-the-art. Also, we introduce stochasticity into the emotion mixture that yields emotionally more varied empathetic responses than the previous work. We demonstrate the importance of these factors to empathetic response generation using both automatic- and human-based evaluations. The implementation of MIME is publicly available at https://github.com/declare-lab/MIME.

In this paper, we address the task of utterance level emotion recognition in conversations using commonsense knowledge. We propose COSMIC, a new framework that incorporates different elements of commonsense such as mental states, events, and causal relations, and build upon them to learn interactions between interlocutors participating in a conversation. Current state-of-theart methods often encounter difficulties in context propagation, emotion shift detection, and differentiating between related emotion classes. By learning distinct commonsense representations, COSMIC addresses these challenges and achieves new state-of-the-art results for emotion recognition on four different benchmark conversational datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/declare-lab/conv-emotion.

Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) has received much attention, lately, from researchers due to its potential widespread applications in diverse areas, such as health-care, education, and human resources. In this paper, we present Dialogue Graph Convolutional Network (DialogueGCN), a graph neural network based approach to ERC. We leverage self and inter-speaker dependency of the interlocutors to model conversational context for emotion recognition. Through the graph network, DialogueGCN addresses context propagation issues present in the current RNN-based methods. We empirically show that this method alleviates such issues, while outperforming the current state of the art on a number of benchmark emotion classification datasets.

Emotion recognition in conversations is a challenging task that has recently gained popularity due to its potential applications. Until now, however, a large-scale multimodal multi-party emotional conversational database containing more than two speakers per dialogue was missing. Thus, we propose the Multimodal EmotionLines Dataset (MELD), an extension and enhancement of EmotionLines. MELD contains about 13,000 utterances from 1,433 dialogues from the TV-series Friends. Each utterance is annotated with emotion and sentiment labels, and encompasses audio, visual and textual modalities. We propose several strong multimodal baselines and show the importance of contextual and multimodal information for emotion recognition in conversations. The full dataset is available for use at http://affective-meld.github.io.

Sarcasm is often expressed through several verbal and non-verbal cues, e.g., a change of tone, overemphasis in a word, a drawn-out syllable, or a straight looking face. Most of the recent work in sarcasm detection has been carried out on textual data. In this paper, we argue that incorporating multimodal cues can improve the automatic classification of sarcasm. As a first step towards enabling the development of multimodal approaches for sarcasm detection, we propose a new sarcasm dataset, Multimodal Sarcasm Detection Dataset (MUStARD), compiled from popular TV shows. MUStARD consists of audiovisual utterances annotated with sarcasm labels. Each utterance is accompanied by its context of historical utterances in the dialogue, which provides additional information on the scenario where the utterance occurs. Our initial results show that the use of multimodal information can reduce the relative error rate of sarcasm detection by up to 12.9% in F-score when compared to the use of individual modalities. The full dataset is publicly available for use at https://github.com/soujanyaporia/MUStARD.

Related tasks often have inter-dependence on each other and perform better when solved in a joint framework. In this paper, we present a deep multi-task learning framework that jointly performs sentiment and emotion analysis both. The multi-modal inputs (i.e. text, acoustic and visual frames) of a video convey diverse and distinctive information, and usually do not have equal contribution in the decision making. We propose a context-level inter-modal attention framework for simultaneously predicting the sentiment and expressed emotions of an utterance. We evaluate our proposed approach on CMU-MOSEI dataset for multi-modal sentiment and emotion analysis. Evaluation results suggest that multi-task learning framework offers improvement over the single-task framework. The proposed approach reports new state-of-the-art performance for both sentiment analysis and emotion analysis.

Emotion recognition in conversations is crucial for the development of empathetic machines. Present methods mostly ignore the role of inter-speaker dependency relations while classifying emotions in conversations. In this paper, we address recognizing utterance-level emotions in dyadic conversational videos. We propose a deep neural framework, termed Conversational Memory Network (CMN), which leverages contextual information from the conversation history. In particular, CMN uses multimodal approach comprising audio, visual and textual features with gated recurrent units to model past utterances of each speaker into memories. These memories are then merged using attention-based hops to capture inter-speaker dependencies. Experiments show a significant improvement of 3 − 4% in accuracy over the state of the art.

Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis is a fine-grained task of sentiment classification for multiple aspects in a sentence. Present neural-based models exploit aspect and its contextual information in the sentence but largely ignore the inter-aspect dependencies. In this paper, we incorporate this pattern by simultaneous classification of all aspects in a sentence along with temporal dependency processing of their corresponding sentence representations using recurrent networks. Results on the benchmark SemEval 2014 dataset suggest the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

Emotion recognition in conversations is crucial for building empathetic machines. Present works in this domain do not explicitly consider the inter-personal influences that thrive in the emotional dynamics of dialogues. To this end, we propose Interactive COnversational memory Network (ICON), a multimodal emotion detection framework that extracts multimodal features from conversational videos and hierarchically models the self- and inter-speaker emotional influences into global memories. Such memories generate contextual summaries which aid in predicting the emotional orientation of utterance-videos. Our model outperforms state-of-the-art networks on multiple classification and regression tasks in two benchmark datasets.

Sentiment analysis has immense implications in e-commerce through user feedback mining. Aspect-based sentiment analysis takes this one step further by enabling businesses to extract aspect specific sentimental information. In this paper, we present a novel approach of incorporating the neighboring aspects related information into the sentiment classification of the target aspect using memory networks. We show that our method outperforms the state of the art by 1.6% on average in two distinct domains: restaurant and laptop.

Multi-modal sentiment analysis offers various challenges, one being the effective combination of different input modalities, namely text, visual and acoustic. In this paper, we propose a recurrent neural network based multi-modal attention framework that leverages the contextual information for utterance-level sentiment prediction. The proposed approach applies attention on multi-modal multi-utterance representations and tries to learn the contributing features amongst them. We evaluate our proposed approach on two multi-modal sentiment analysis benchmark datasets, viz. CMU Multi-modal Opinion-level Sentiment Intensity (CMU-MOSI) corpus and the recently released CMU Multi-modal Opinion Sentiment and Emotion Intensity (CMU-MOSEI) corpus. Evaluation results show the effectiveness of our proposed approach with the accuracies of 82.31% and 79.80% for the MOSI and MOSEI datasets, respectively. These are approximately 2 and 1 points performance improvement over the state-of-the-art models for the datasets.

The literature in automated sarcasm detection has mainly focused on lexical-, syntactic- and semantic-level analysis of text. However, a sarcastic sentence can be expressed with contextual presumptions, background and commonsense knowledge. In this paper, we propose a ContextuAl SarCasm DEtector (CASCADE), which adopts a hybrid approach of both content- and context-driven modeling for sarcasm detection in online social media discussions. For the latter, CASCADE aims at extracting contextual information from the discourse of a discussion thread. Also, since the sarcastic nature and form of expression can vary from person to person, CASCADE utilizes user embeddings that encode stylometric and personality features of users. When used along with content-based feature extractors such as convolutional neural networks, we see a significant boost in the classification performance on a large Reddit corpus.

Analyzing human multimodal language is an emerging area of research in NLP. Intrinsically this language is multimodal (heterogeneous), sequential and asynchronous; it consists of the language (words), visual (expressions) and acoustic (paralinguistic) modalities all in the form of asynchronous coordinated sequences. From a resource perspective, there is a genuine need for large scale datasets that allow for in-depth studies of this form of language. In this paper we introduce CMU Multimodal Opinion Sentiment and Emotion Intensity (CMU-MOSEI), the largest dataset of sentiment analysis and emotion recognition to date. Using data from CMU-MOSEI and a novel multimodal fusion technique called the Dynamic Fusion Graph (DFG), we conduct experimentation to exploit how modalities interact with each other in human multimodal language. Unlike previously proposed fusion techniques, DFG is highly interpretable and achieves competative performance when compared to the previous state of the art.

Multimodal sentiment analysis is a developing area of research, which involves the identification of sentiments in videos. Current research considers utterances as independent entities, i.e., ignores the interdependencies and relations among the utterances of a video. In this paper, we propose a LSTM-based model that enables utterances to capture contextual information from their surroundings in the same video, thus aiding the classification process. Our method shows 5-10% performance improvement over the state of the art and high robustness to generalizability.

Multimodal sentiment analysis is an increasingly popular research area, which extends the conventional language-based definition of sentiment analysis to a multimodal setup where other relevant modalities accompany language. In this paper, we pose the problem of multimodal sentiment analysis as modeling intra-modality and inter-modality dynamics. We introduce a novel model, termed Tensor Fusion Networks, which learns both such dynamics end-to-end. The proposed approach is tailored for the volatile nature of spoken language in online videos as well as accompanying gestures and voice. In the experiments, our model outperforms state-of-the-art approaches for both multimodal and unimodal sentiment analysis.

Sarcasm detection is a key task for many natural language processing tasks. In sentiment analysis, for example, sarcasm can flip the polarity of an “apparently positive” sentence and, hence, negatively affect polarity detection performance. To date, most approaches to sarcasm detection have treated the task primarily as a text categorization problem. Sarcasm, however, can be expressed in very subtle ways and requires a deeper understanding of natural language that standard text categorization techniques cannot grasp. In this work, we develop models based on a pre-trained convolutional neural network for extracting sentiment, emotion and personality features for sarcasm detection. Such features, along with the network’s baseline features, allow the proposed models to outperform the state of the art on benchmark datasets. We also address the often ignored generalizability issue of classifying data that have not been seen by the models at learning phase.

An important difference between traditional AI systems and human intelligence is the human ability to harness commonsense knowledge gleaned from a lifetime of learning and experience to make informed decisions. This allows humans to adapt easily to novel situations where AI fails catastrophically due to a lack of situation-specific rules and generalization capabilities. Commonsense knowledge also provides background information that enables humans to successfully operate in social situations where such knowledge is typically assumed. Since commonsense consists of information that humans take for granted, gathering it is an extremely difficult task. Previous versions of SenticNet were focused on collecting this kind of knowledge for sentiment analysis but they were heavily limited by their inability to generalize. SenticNet 4 overcomes such limitations by leveraging on conceptual primitives automatically generated by means of hierarchical clustering and dimensionality reduction.