The long-standing goal of dense retrievers in abtractive open-domain question answering (ODQA) tasks is to learn to capture evidence passages among relevant passages for any given query, such that the reader produce factually correct outputs from evidence passages. One of the key challenge is the insufficient amount of training data with the supervision of the answerability of the passages. Recent studies rely on iterative pipelines to annotate answerability using signals from the reader, but their high computational costs hamper practical applications. In this paper, we instead focus on a data-driven approach and propose Evidentiality-Aware Dense Passage Retrieval (EADPR), which leverages synthetic distractor samples to learn to discriminate evidence passages from distractors. We conduct extensive experiments to validate the effectiveness of our proposed method on multiple abstractive ODQA tasks.

Memorizing and utilizing speakers’ personas is a common practice for response generation in long-term conversations. Yet, human-authored datasets often provide uninformative persona sentences that hinder response quality. This paper presents a novel framework that leverages commonsense-based persona expansion to address such issues in long-term conversation.While prior work focuses on not producing personas that contradict others, we focus on transforming contradictory personas into sentences that contain rich speaker information, by refining them based on their contextual backgrounds with designed strategies. As the pioneer of persona expansion in multi-session settings, our framework facilitates better response generation via human-like persona refinement. The supplementary video of our work is available at https://caffeine-15bbf.web.app/.

Human-like chatbots necessitate the use of commonsense reasoning in order to effectively comprehend and respond to implicit information present within conversations. Achieving such coherence and informativeness in responses, however, is a non-trivial task. Even for large language models (LLMs), the task of identifying and aggregating key evidence within a single hop presents a substantial challenge. This complexity arises because such evidence is scattered across multiple turns in a conversation, thus necessitating integration over multiple hops. Hence, our focus is to facilitate such multi-hop reasoning over a dialogue context, namely dialogue chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. To this end, we propose a knowledge distillation framework that leverages LLMs as unreliable teachers and selectively distills consistent and helpful rationales via alignment filters. We further present DOCTOR, a DialOgue Chain-of-ThOught Reasoner that provides reliable CoT rationales for response generation. We conduct extensive experiments to show that enhancing dialogue agents with high-quality rationales from DOCTOR significantly improves the quality of their responses.

Recently, finetuning a pretrained language model to capture the similarity between sentence embeddings has shown the state-of-the-art performance on the semantic textual similarity (STS) task. However, the absence of an interpretation method for the sentence similarity makes it difficult to explain the model output. In this work, we explicitly describe the sentence distance as the weighted sum of contextualized token distances on the basis of a transportation problem, and then present the optimal transport-based distance measure, named RCMD; it identifies and leverages semantically-aligned token pairs. In the end, we propose CLRCMD, a contrastive learning framework that optimizes RCMD of sentence pairs, which enhances the quality of sentence similarity and their interpretation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our learning framework outperforms other baselines on both STS and interpretable-STS benchmarks, indicating that it computes effective sentence similarity and also provides interpretation consistent with human judgement.

Topic taxonomies display hierarchical topic structures of a text corpus and provide topical knowledge to enhance various NLP applications. To dynamically incorporate new topic information, several recent studies have tried to expand (or complete) a topic taxonomy by inserting emerging topics identified in a set of new documents. However, existing methods focus only on frequent terms in documents and the local topic-subtopic relations in a taxonomy, which leads to limited topic term coverage and fails to model the global taxonomy structure. In this work, we propose a novel framework for topic taxonomy expansion, named TopicExpan, which directly generates topic-related terms belonging to new topics. Specifically, TopicExpan leverages the hierarchical relation structure surrounding a new topic and the textual content of an input document for topic term generation. This approach encourages newly-inserted topics to further cover important but less frequent terms as well as to keep their relation consistency within the taxonomy. Experimental results on two real-world text corpora show that TopicExpan significantly outperforms other baseline methods in terms of the quality of output taxonomies.

Recent studies on neural networks with pre-trained weights (i.e., BERT) have mainly focused on a low-dimensional subspace, where the embedding vectors computed from input words (or their contexts) are located. In this work, we propose a new approach, called OoMMix, to finding and regularizing the remainder of the space, referred to as out-of-manifold, which cannot be accessed through the words. Specifically, we synthesize the out-of-manifold embeddings based on two embeddings obtained from actually-observed words, to utilize them for fine-tuning the network. A discriminator is trained to detect whether an input embedding is located inside the manifold or not, and simultaneously, a generator is optimized to produce new embeddings that can be easily identified as out-of-manifold by the discriminator. These two modules successfully collaborate in a unified and end-to-end manner for regularizing the out-of-manifold. Our extensive evaluation on various text classification benchmarks demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach, as well as its good compatibility with existing data augmentation techniques which aim to enhance the manifold.