Bo-Ru Lu


2022

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Unsupervised Learning of Hierarchical Conversation Structure
Bo-Ru Lu | Yushi Hu | Hao Cheng | Noah A. Smith | Mari Ostendorf
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

Human conversations can evolve in many different ways, creating challenges for automatic understanding and summarization. Goal-oriented conversations often have meaningful sub-dialogue structure, but it can be highly domain-dependent. This work introduces an unsupervised approach to learning hierarchical conversation structure, including turn and sub-dialogue segment labels, corresponding roughly to dialogue acts and sub-tasks, respectively. The decoded structure is shown to be useful in enhancing neural models of language for three conversation-level understanding tasks. Further, the learned finite-state sub-dialogue network is made interpretable through automatic summarization.

2021

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DIALKI: Knowledge Identification in Conversational Systems through Dialogue-Document Contextualization
Zeqiu Wu | Bo-Ru Lu | Hannaneh Hajishirzi | Mari Ostendorf
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Identifying relevant knowledge to be used in conversational systems that are grounded in long documents is critical to effective response generation. We introduce a knowledge identification model that leverages the document structure to provide dialogue-contextualized passage encodings and better locate knowledge relevant to the conversation. An auxiliary loss captures the history of dialogue-document connections. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our model on two document-grounded conversational datasets and provide analyses showing generalization to unseen documents and long dialogue contexts.