Yulan Feng


2022

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Interactive Evaluation of Dialog Track at DSTC9
Shikib Mehri | Yulan Feng | Carla Gordon | Seyed Hossein Alavi | David Traum | Maxine Eskenazi
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

The ultimate goal of dialog research is to develop systems that can be effectively used in interactive settings by real users. To this end, we introduced the Interactive Evaluation of Dialog Track at the 9th Dialog System Technology Challenge. This track consisted of two sub-tasks. The first sub-task involved building knowledge-grounded response generation models. The second sub-task aimed to extend dialog models beyond static datasets by assessing them in an interactive setting with real users. Our track challenges participants to develop strong response generation models and explore strategies that extend them to back-and-forth interactions with real users. The progression from static corpora to interactive evaluation introduces unique challenges and facilitates a more thorough assessment of open-domain dialog systems. This paper provides an overview of the track, including the methodology and results. Furthermore, it provides insights into how to best evaluate open-domain dialog models.

2020

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“None of the Above”: Measure Uncertainty in Dialog Response Retrieval
Yulan Feng | Shikib Mehri | Maxine Eskenazi | Tiancheng Zhao
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

This paper discusses the importance of uncovering uncertainty in end-to-end dialog tasks and presents our experimental results on uncertainty classification on the processed Ubuntu Dialog Corpus. We show that instead of retraining models for this specific purpose, we can capture the original retrieval model’s underlying confidence concerning the best prediction using trivial additional computation.

2018

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Let’s do it “again”: A First Computational Approach to Detecting Adverbial Presupposition Triggers
Andre Cianflone | Yulan Feng | Jad Kabbara | Jackie Chi Kit Cheung
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

We introduce the novel task of predicting adverbial presupposition triggers, which is useful for natural language generation tasks such as summarization and dialogue systems. We introduce two new corpora, derived from the Penn Treebank and the Annotated English Gigaword dataset and investigate the use of a novel attention mechanism tailored to this task. Our attention mechanism augments a baseline recurrent neural network without the need for additional trainable parameters, minimizing the added computational cost of our mechanism. We demonstrate that this model statistically outperforms our baselines.

2016

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Capturing Pragmatic Knowledge in Article Usage Prediction using LSTMs
Jad Kabbara | Yulan Feng | Jackie Chi Kit Cheung
Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers

We examine the potential of recurrent neural networks for handling pragmatic inferences involving complex contextual cues for the task of article usage prediction. We train and compare several variants of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks with an attention mechanism. Our model outperforms a previous state-of-the-art system, achieving up to 96.63% accuracy on the WSJ/PTB corpus. In addition, we perform a series of analyses to understand the impact of various model choices. We find that the gain in performance can be attributed to the ability of LSTMs to pick up on contextual cues, both local and further away in distance, and that the model is able to solve cases involving reasoning about coreference and synonymy. We also show how the attention mechanism contributes to the interpretability of the model’s effectiveness.