Anqi Liu


2023

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MTGP: Multi-turn Target-oriented Dialogue Guided by Generative Global Path with Flexible Turns
Anqi Liu | Bo Wang | Yue Tan | Dongming Zhao | Kun Huang | Ruifang He | Yuexian Hou
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Target-oriented dialogue guides the dialogue to a target quickly and smoothly. The latest approaches focus on global planning, which plans toward the target before the conversation instead of adopting a greedy strategy during the conversation. However, the global plan in existing works is fixed to certain turns by generating paths with certain nodes, which limits the optimization of turns and coherence of the target-oriented process. Toward flexible global planning, we propose to generate a global path as a natural language sentence instead of a sequence of nodes. With this path, the dialog is guided to the target with flexible turns of dialog. For model training, we also extract targetoriented dialogues from the chit-chat corpus with a knowledge graph. We conduct experiments on three datasets and simulate scenarios with and without user participation. The results show that our method has fewer turns, more coherent semantics, and a higher success rate in reaching the target than baselines.

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Guiding Dialogue Agents to Complex Semantic Targets by Dynamically Completing Knowledge Graph
Yue Tan | Bo Wang | Anqi Liu | Dongming Zhao | Kun Huang | Ruifang He | Yuexian Hou
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

In the target-oriented dialogue, the representation and achievement of targets are two interrelated essential issues. In current approaches, the target is typically supposed to be a single object represented as a word, which makes it relatively easy to achieve the target through dialogue with the help of a knowledge graph (KG). However, when the target has complex semantics, the existing knowledge graph is often incomplete in tracking complex semantic relations. This paper studies target-oriented dialog where the target is a topic sentence. We combine the methods of knowledge retrieval and relationship prediction to construct a context-related dynamic KG. On dynamic KG, we can track the implicit semantic paths in the speaker’s mind that may not exist in the existing KGs. In addition, we also designed a novel metric to evaluate the tracked path automatically. The experimental results show that our method can control the agent more logically and smoothly toward the complex target.

2022

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Calibrating Zero-shot Cross-lingual (Un-)structured Predictions
Zhengping Jiang | Anqi Liu | Benjamin Van Durme
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

We investigate model calibration in the setting of zero-shot cross-lingual transfer with large-scale pre-trained language models. The level of model calibration is an important metric for evaluating the trustworthiness of predictive models. There exists an essential need for model calibration when natural language models are deployed in critical tasks. We study different post-training calibration methods in structured and unstructured prediction tasks. We find that models trained with data from the source language become less calibrated when applied to the target language and that calibration errors increase with intrinsic task difficulty and relative sparsity of training data. Moreover, we observe a potential connection between the level of calibration error and an earlier proposed measure of the distance from English to other languages. Finally, our comparison demonstrates that among other methods Temperature Scaling (TS) generalizes well to distant languages, but TS fails to calibrate more complex confidence estimation in structured predictions compared to more expressive alternatives like Gaussian Process Calibration.

2016

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Etude acoustique et représentation phonologique sur /ə˞/ suffixe rhotique en mandarin (Acoustic study and phonological representation of the rhotic suffix /ə˞/ in mandarin)
Anqi Liu
Actes de la conférence conjointe JEP-TALN-RECITAL 2016. volume 1 : JEP

Historiquement, le suffixe /ə˞/ est un suffixe diminutif correspondant au mot 儿 (<er> en pinyin) qui signifie ”petitesse”. Il relève d’une particularité du style plutôt que de la grammaire. Il apparait souvent dans la parole des locuteurs du nord de la Chine. Pour mieux comprendre le phénomène et son comportement phonologique, on présente les résultats d’une étude acoustique qui vérifie les effets de la rhoticité sur les voyelles adjacentes. Sur la base de ces résultats, on propose une représentation gestuelle du suffixe et des processus qui l’impliquent dans le cadre de la phonologie articulatoire (Browman & Goldstein1992).