Recently, empathetic dialogue systems have received significant attention.While some researchers have noted limitations, e.g., that these systems tend to generate generic utterances, no study has systematically verified these issues. We survey 21 systems, asking what progress has been made on the task. We observe multiple limitations of current evaluation procedures. Most critically, studies tend to rely on a single non-reproducible empathy score, which inadequately reflects the multidimensional nature of empathy. To better understand the differences between systems, we comprehensively analyze each system with automated methods that are grounded in a variety of aspects of empathy. We find that recent systems lack three important aspects of empathy: specificity, reflection levels, and diversity. Based on our results, we discuss problematic behaviors that may have gone undetected in prior evaluations, and offer guidance for developing future systems.

Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has enabled the deployment of many generative NLP applications. At the same time, it has also led to a misleading public discourse that “it’s all been solved.” Not surprisingly, this has, in turn, made many NLP researchers – especially those at the beginning of their careers – worry about what NLP research area they should focus on. Has it all been solved, or what remaining questions can we work on regardless of LLMs? To address this question, this paper compiles NLP research directions rich for exploration. We identify fourteen different research areas encompassing 45 research directions that require new research and are not directly solvable by LLMs. While we identify many research areas, many others exist; we do not cover areas currently addressed by LLMs, but where LLMs lag behind in performance or those focused on LLM development. We welcome suggestions for other research directions to include: https://bit.ly/nlp-era-llm.

Synthetic data generation has the potential to impact applications and domains with scarce data. However, before such data is used for sensitive tasks such as mental health, we need an understanding of how different demographics are represented in it. In our paper, we analyze the potential of producing synthetic data using GPT-3 by exploring the various stressors it attributes to different race and gender combinations, to provide insight for future researchers looking into using LLMs for data generation. Using GPT-3, we develop HeadRoom, a synthetic dataset of 3,120 posts about depression-triggering stressors, by controlling for race, gender, and time frame (before and after COVID-19). Using this dataset, we conduct semantic and lexical analyses to (1) identify the predominant stressors for each demographic group; and (2) compare our synthetic data to a human-generated dataset. We present the procedures to generate queries to develop depression data using GPT-3, and conduct analyzes to uncover the types of stressors it assigns to demographic groups, which could be used to test the limitations of LLMs for synthetic data generation for depression data. Our findings show that synthetic data mimics some of the human-generated data distribution for the predominant depression stressors across diverse demographics.

Understanding empathy in text dialogue data is a difficult, yet critical, skill for effective human-machine interaction. In this work, we ask whether systems are making meaningful progress on this challenge. We consider a simple model that checks if an input utterance is similar to a small set of empathetic examples. Crucially, the model does not look at what the utterance is a response to, i.e., the dialogue context. This model performs comparably to other work on standard benchmarks and even outperforms state-of-the-art models for empathetic rationale extraction by 16.7 points on T-F1 and 4.3 on IOU-F1. This indicates that current systems rely on the surface form of the response, rather than whether it is suitable in context. To confirm this, we create examples with dialogue contexts that change the interpretation of the response and show that current systems continue to label utterances as empathetic. We discuss the implications of our findings, including improvements for empathetic benchmarks and how our model can be an informative baseline.

How do sequence models represent their decision-making process? Prior work suggests that Othello-playing neural network learned nonlinear models of the board state (Li et al., 2023a). In this work, we provide evidence of a closely related linear representation of the board. In particular, we show that probing for “my colour” vs. “opponent’s colour” may be a simple yet powerful way to interpret the model’s internal state. This precise understanding of the internal representations allows us to control the model’s behaviour with simple vector arithmetic. Linear representations enable significant interpretability progress, which we demonstrate with further exploration of how the world model is computed.

Many statistical models have high accuracy on test benchmarks, but are not explainable, struggle in low-resource scenarios, cannot be reused for multiple tasks, and cannot easily integrate domain expertise. These factors limit their use, particularly in settings such as mental health, where it is difficult to annotate datasets and model outputs have significant impact. We introduce a micromodel architecture to address these challenges. Our approach allows researchers to build interpretable representations that embed domain knowledge and provide explanations throughout the model’s decision process. We demonstrate the idea on multiple mental health tasks: depression classification, PTSD classification, and suicidal risk assessment. Our systems consistently produce strong results, even in low-resource scenarios, and are more interpretable than alternative methods.

In a corpus of data, outliers are either errors: mistakes in the data that are counterproductive, or are unique: informative samples that improve model robustness. Identifying outliers can lead to better datasets by (1) removing noise in datasets and (2) guiding collection of additional data to fill gaps. However, the problem of detecting both outlier types has received relatively little attention in NLP, particularly for dialog systems. We introduce a simple and effective technique for detecting both erroneous and unique samples in a corpus of short texts using neural sentence embeddings combined with distance-based outlier detection. We also present a novel data collection pipeline built atop our detection technique to automatically and iteratively mine unique data samples while discarding erroneous samples. Experiments show that our outlier detection technique is effective at finding errors while our data collection pipeline yields highly diverse corpora that in turn produce more robust intent classification and slot-filling models.

Task-oriented dialog systems need to know when a query falls outside their range of supported intents, but current text classification corpora only define label sets that cover every example. We introduce a new dataset that includes queries that are out-of-scope—i.e., queries that do not fall into any of the system’s supported intents. This poses a new challenge because models cannot assume that every query at inference time belongs to a system-supported intent class. Our dataset also covers 150 intent classes over 10 domains, capturing the breadth that a production task-oriented agent must handle. We evaluate a range of benchmark classifiers on our dataset along with several different out-of-scope identification schemes. We find that while the classifiers perform well on in-scope intent classification, they struggle to identify out-of-scope queries. Our dataset and evaluation fill an important gap in the field, offering a way of more rigorously and realistically benchmarking text classification in task-driven dialog systems.