Haifeng Tang


2023

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In-sample Curriculum Learning by Sequence Completion for Natural Language Generation
Qi Jia | Yizhu Liu | Haifeng Tang | Kenny Zhu
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Curriculum learning has shown promising improvements in multiple domains by training machine learning models from easy samples to hard ones. Previous works which either design rules or train models for scoring the difficulty highly rely on task-specific expertise, and cannot generalize. Inspired by the “easy-to-hard” intuition, we propose to do in-sample curriculum learning for natural language generation tasks. Our learning strategy starts training the model to generate the last few words, i.e., do sequence completion, and gradually extends to generate the whole output sequence. Comprehensive experiments show that it generalizes well to different tasks and achieves significant improvements over strong baselines.

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Reducing Sensitivity on Speaker Names for Text Generation from Dialogues
Qi Jia | Haifeng Tang | Kenny Zhu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Changing speaker names consistently throughout a dialogue should not affect its meaning and corresponding outputs for text generation from dialogues. However, pre-trained language models, serving as the backbone for dialogue-processing tasks, have shown to be sensitive to nuances. This may result in unfairness in real-world applications. No comprehensive analysis of this problem has been done in the past. In this work, we propose to quantitatively measure a model’s sensitivity on speaker names, and comprehensively evaluate a number of known methods for reducing speaker name sensitivity, including a novel approach of our own. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets provide a benchmark for this problem and show the favorable performance of our approach in sensitivity reduction and quality of generation.

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Incomplete Utterance Rewriting by A Two-Phase Locate-and-Fill Regime
Zitong Li | Jiawei Li | Haifeng Tang | Kenny Zhu | Ruolan Yang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Rewriting incomplete and ambiguous utterances can improve dialogue models’ understanding of the context and help them generate better results. However, the existing end-to-end models will have the problem of too large search space, resulting in poor quality of rewriting results. We propose a 2-phase rewriting framework which first predicts the empty slots in the utterance that need to be completed, and then generate the part to be filled into each positions. Our framework is simple to implement, fast to run, and achieves the state-of-the-art results on several public rewriting datasets.

2022

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ChatMatch: Evaluating Chatbots by Autonomous Chat Tournaments
Ruolan Yang | Zitong Li | Haifeng Tang | Kenny Zhu
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Existing automatic evaluation systems of chatbots mostly rely on static chat scripts as ground truth, which is hard to obtain, and requires access to the models of the bots as a form of “white-box testing”. Interactive evaluation mitigates this problem but requires human involvement. In our work, we propose an interactive chatbot evaluation framework in which chatbots compete with each other like in a sports tournament, using flexible scoring metrics. This framework can efficiently rank chatbots independently from their model architectures and the domains for which they are trained.

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Post-Training Dialogue Summarization using Pseudo-Paraphrasing
Qi Jia | Yizhu Liu | Haifeng Tang | Kenny Zhu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022

Previous dialogue summarization techniques adapt large language models pretrained on the narrative text by injecting dialogue-specific features into the models. These features either require additional knowledge to recognize or make the resulting models harder to tune. To bridge the format gap between dialogues and narrative summaries in dialogue summarization tasks, we propose to post-train pretrained language models (PLMs) to rephrase from dialogue to narratives. After that, the model is fine-tuned for dialogue summarization as usual. Comprehensive experiments show that our approach significantly improves vanilla PLMs on dialogue summarization and outperforms other SOTA models by the summary quality and implementation costs.

2020

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Multi-turn Response Selection using Dialogue Dependency Relations
Qi Jia | Yizhu Liu | Siyu Ren | Kenny Zhu | Haifeng Tang
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Multi-turn response selection is a task designed for developing dialogue agents. The performance on this task has a remarkable improvement with pre-trained language models. However, these models simply concatenate the turns in dialogue history as the input and largely ignore the dependencies between the turns. In this paper, we propose a dialogue extraction algorithm to transform a dialogue history into threads based on their dependency relations. Each thread can be regarded as a self-contained sub-dialogue. We also propose Thread-Encoder model to encode threads and candidates into compact representations by pre-trained Transformers and finally get the matching score through an attention layer. The experiments show that dependency relations are helpful for dialogue context understanding, and our model outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines on both DSTC7 and DSTC8*, with competitive results on UbuntuV2.