Pei Zhou


2023

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I Cast Detect Thoughts: Learning to Converse and Guide with Intents and Theory-of-Mind in Dungeons and Dragons
Pei Zhou | Andrew Zhu | Jennifer Hu | Jay Pujara | Xiang Ren | Chris Callison-Burch | Yejin Choi | Prithviraj Ammanabrolu
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

We propose a novel task, G4C, to study teacher-student natural language interactions in a goal-driven and grounded environment. Dungeons and Dragons (D&D), a role-playing game, provides an ideal setting to investigate such interactions. Here, the Dungeon Master (DM), i.e., the teacher, guides the actions of several players—students, each with their own personas and abilities—to achieve shared goals grounded in a fantasy world. Our approach is to decompose and model these interactions into (1) the DM’s intent to guide players toward a given goal; (2) the DM’s guidance utterance to the players expressing this intent; and (3) a theory-of-mind (ToM) model that anticipates the players’ reaction to the guidance one turn into the future. We develop a novel reinforcement learning (RL) method for training a DM that generates guidance for players by rewarding utterances where the intent matches the ToM-anticipated player actions. Human and automated evaluations show that a DM trained to explicitly model intents and incorporate ToM of the players using RL generates better-quality guidance that is 3x more likely to fulfill the DM’s intent than a vanilla natural language generation (NLG) approach.

2022

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Think Before You Speak: Explicitly Generating Implicit Commonsense Knowledge for Response Generation
Pei Zhou | Karthik Gopalakrishnan | Behnam Hedayatnia | Seokhwan Kim | Jay Pujara | Xiang Ren | Yang Liu | Dilek Hakkani-Tur
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Implicit knowledge, such as common sense, is key to fluid human conversations. Current neural response generation (RG) models are trained to generate responses directly, omitting unstated implicit knowledge. In this paper, we present Think-Before-Speaking (TBS), a generative approach to first externalize implicit commonsense knowledge (think) and use this knowledge to generate responses (speak). We argue that externalizing implicit knowledge allows more efficient learning, produces more informative responses, and enables more explainable models. We analyze different choices to collect knowledge-aligned dialogues, represent implicit knowledge, and transition between knowledge and dialogues. Empirical results show TBS models outperform end-to-end and knowledge-augmented RG baselines on most automatic metrics and generate more informative, specific, and commonsense-following responses, as evaluated by human annotators. TBS also generates knowledge that makes sense and is relevant to the dialogue around 85% of the time

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Reflect, Not Reflex: Inference-Based Common Ground Improves Dialogue Response Quality
Pei Zhou | Hyundong Cho | Pegah Jandaghi | Dong-Ho Lee | Bill Yuchen Lin | Jay Pujara | Xiang Ren
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Human communication relies on common ground (CG), the mutual knowledge and beliefs shared by participants, to produce coherent and interesting conversations. In this paper, we demonstrate that current response generation (RG) models produce generic and dull responses in dialogues because they act reflexively, failing to explicitly model CG, both due to the lack of CG in training data and the standard RG training procedure. We introduce Reflect, a dataset that annotates dialogues with explicit CG (materialized as inferences approximating shared knowledge and beliefs) and solicits 9k diverse human-generated responses each following one common ground. Using Reflect, we showcase the limitations of current dialogue data and RG models: less than half of the responses in current data is rated as high quality (sensible, specific, and interesting) and models trained using this data have even lower quality, while most Reflect responses are judged high quality. Next, we analyze whether CG can help models produce better quality responses by using Reflect CG to guide RG models. Surprisingly, we find that simply prompting GPT3 to “think” about CG generates 30% more quality responses, showing promising benefits to integrating CG into the RG process.

2021

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Probing Commonsense Explanation in Dialogue Response Generation
Pei Zhou | Pegah Jandaghi | Hyundong Cho | Bill Yuchen Lin | Jay Pujara | Xiang Ren
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

Humans use commonsense reasoning (CSR) implicitly to produce natural and coherent responses in conversations. Aiming to close the gap between current response generation (RG) models and human communication abilities, we want to understand why RG models respond as they do by probing RG model’s understanding of commonsense reasoning that elicits proper responses. We formalize the problem by framing commonsense as a latent variable in the RG task and using explanations for responses as textual form of commonsense. We collect 6k annotated explanations justifying responses from four dialogue datasets and ask humans to verify them and propose two probing settings to evaluate RG models’ CSR capabilities. Probing results show that models fail to capture the logical relations between commonsense explanations and responses and fine-tuning on in-domain data and increasing model sizes do not lead to understanding of CSR for RG. We hope our study motivates more research in making RG models emulate the human reasoning process in pursuit of smooth human-AI communication.

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Think Before You Speak: Learning to Generate Implicit Knowledge for Response Generation by Self-Talk
Pei Zhou | Behnam Hedayatnia | Karthik Gopalakrishnan | Seokhwan Kim | Jay Pujara | Xiang Ren | Yang Liu | Dilek Hakkani-Tur
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Conversational AI

Humans make appropriate responses not only based on previous dialogue utterances but also on implicit background knowledge such as common sense. Although neural response generation models seem to produce human-like responses, they are mostly end-to-end and not generating intermediate grounds between a dialogue history and responses. This work aims to study if and how we can train an RG model that talks with itself to generate implicit knowledge before making responses. We further investigate can such models identify when to generate implicit background knowledge and when it is not necessary. Experimental results show that compared with models that directly generate responses given a dialogue history, self-talk models produce better-quality responses according to human evaluation on grammaticality, coherence, and engagingness. And models that are trained to identify when to self-talk further improves the response quality. Analysis on generated implicit knowledge shows that models mostly use the knowledge appropriately in the responses.

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Lawyers are Dishonest? Quantifying Representational Harms in Commonsense Knowledge Resources
Ninareh Mehrabi | Pei Zhou | Fred Morstatter | Jay Pujara | Xiang Ren | Aram Galstyan
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Warning: this paper contains content that may be offensive or upsetting. Commonsense knowledge bases (CSKB) are increasingly used for various natural language processing tasks. Since CSKBs are mostly human-generated and may reflect societal biases, it is important to ensure that such biases are not conflated with the notion of commonsense. Here we focus on two widely used CSKBs, ConceptNet and GenericsKB, and establish the presence of bias in the form of two types of representational harms, overgeneralization of polarized perceptions and representation disparity across different demographic groups in both CSKBs. Next, we find similar representational harms for downstream models that use ConceptNet. Finally, we propose a filtering-based approach for mitigating such harms, and observe that our filtered-based approach can reduce the issues in both resources and models but leads to a performance drop, leaving room for future work to build fairer and stronger commonsense models.

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RICA: Evaluating Robust Inference Capabilities Based on Commonsense Axioms
Pei Zhou | Rahul Khanna | Seyeon Lee | Bill Yuchen Lin | Daniel Ho | Jay Pujara | Xiang Ren
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Pre-trained language models (PTLMs) have achieved impressive performance on commonsense inference benchmarks, but their ability to employ commonsense to make robust inferences, which is crucial for effective communications with humans, is debated. In the pursuit of advancing fluid human-AI communication, we propose a new challenge, RICA: Robust Inference using Commonsense Axioms, that evaluates robust commonsense inference despite textual perturbations. To generate data for this challenge, we develop a systematic and scalable procedure using commonsense knowledge bases and probe PTLMs across two different evaluation settings. Extensive experiments on our generated probe sets with more than 10k statements show that PTLMs perform no better than random guessing on the zero-shot setting, are heavily impacted by statistical biases, and are not robust to perturbation attacks. We also find that fine-tuning on similar statements offer limited gains, as PTLMs still fail to generalize to unseen inferences. Our new large-scale benchmark exposes a significant gap between PTLMs and human-level language understanding and offers a new challenge for PTLMs to demonstrate commonsense.

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Commonsense-Focused Dialogues for Response Generation: An Empirical Study
Pei Zhou | Karthik Gopalakrishnan | Behnam Hedayatnia | Seokhwan Kim | Jay Pujara | Xiang Ren | Yang Liu | Dilek Hakkani-Tur
Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue

Smooth and effective communication requires the ability to perform latent or explicit commonsense inference. Prior commonsense reasoning benchmarks (such as SocialIQA and CommonsenseQA) mainly focus on the discriminative task of choosing the right answer from a set of candidates, and do not involve interactive language generation as in dialogue. Moreover, existing dialogue datasets do not explicitly focus on exhibiting commonsense as a facet. In this paper, we present an empirical study of commonsense in dialogue response generation. We first auto-extract commonsensical dialogues from existing dialogue datasets by leveraging ConceptNet, a commonsense knowledge graph. Furthermore, building on social contexts/situations in SocialIQA, we collect a new dialogue dataset with 25K dialogues aimed at exhibiting social commonsense in an interactive setting. We evaluate response generation models trained using these datasets and find that models trained on both extracted and our collected data produce responses that consistently exhibit more commonsense than baselines. Finally we propose an approach for automatic evaluation of commonsense that relies on features derived from ConceptNet and pre-trained language and dialog models, and show reasonable correlation with human evaluation of responses’ commonsense quality.

2020

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Incorporating Commonsense Knowledge Graph in Pretrained Models for Social Commonsense Tasks
Ting-Yun Chang | Yang Liu | Karthik Gopalakrishnan | Behnam Hedayatnia | Pei Zhou | Dilek Hakkani-Tur
Proceedings of Deep Learning Inside Out (DeeLIO): The First Workshop on Knowledge Extraction and Integration for Deep Learning Architectures

Pretrained language models have excelled at many NLP tasks recently; however, their social intelligence is still unsatisfactory. To enable this, machines need to have a more general understanding of our complicated world and develop the ability to perform commonsense reasoning besides fitting the specific downstream tasks. External commonsense knowledge graphs (KGs), such as ConceptNet, provide rich information about words and their relationships. Thus, towards general commonsense learning, we propose two approaches to implicitly and explicitly infuse such KGs into pretrained language models. We demonstrate our proposed methods perform well on SocialIQA, a social commonsense reasoning task, in both limited and full training data regimes.

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CommonGen: A Constrained Text Generation Challenge for Generative Commonsense Reasoning
Bill Yuchen Lin | Wangchunshu Zhou | Ming Shen | Pei Zhou | Chandra Bhagavatula | Yejin Choi | Xiang Ren
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020

Recently, large-scale pre-trained language models have demonstrated impressive performance on several commonsense-reasoning benchmark datasets. However, building machines with commonsense to compose realistically plausible sentences remains challenging. In this paper, we present a constrained text generation task, CommonGen associated with a benchmark dataset, to explicitly test machines for the ability of generative commonsense reasoning. Given a set of common concepts (e.g., dog, frisbee, catch, throw); the task is to generate a coherent sentence describing an everyday scenario using these concepts (e.g., “a man throws a frisbee and his dog catches it”). The CommonGen task is challenging because it inherently requires 1) relational reasoning with background commonsense knowledge and 2) compositional generalization ability to work on unseen concept combinations. Our dataset, constructed through a combination of crowdsourced and existing caption corpora, consists of 77k commonsense descriptions over 35k unique concept-sets. Experiments show that there is a large gap between state-of-the-art text generation models (e.g., T5) and human performance (31.6% v.s. 63.5% in SPICE metric). Furthermore, we demonstrate that the learned generative commonsense reasoning capability can be transferred to improve downstream tasks such as CommonsenseQA (76.9% to 78.4 in dev accuracy) by generating additional context.

2019

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Retrofitting Contextualized Word Embeddings with Paraphrases
Weijia Shi | Muhao Chen | Pei Zhou | Kai-Wei Chang
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Contextualized word embeddings, such as ELMo, provide meaningful representations for words and their contexts. They have been shown to have a great impact on downstream applications. However, we observe that the contextualized embeddings of a word might change drastically when its contexts are paraphrased. As these embeddings are over-sensitive to the context, the downstream model may make different predictions when the input sentence is paraphrased. To address this issue, we propose a post-processing approach to retrofit the embedding with paraphrases. Our method learns an orthogonal transformation on the input space of the contextualized word embedding model, which seeks to minimize the variance of word representations on paraphrased contexts. Experiments show that the proposed method significantly improves ELMo on various sentence classification and inference tasks.

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Examining Gender Bias in Languages with Grammatical Gender
Pei Zhou | Weijia Shi | Jieyu Zhao | Kuan-Hao Huang | Muhao Chen | Ryan Cotterell | Kai-Wei Chang
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Recent studies have shown that word embeddings exhibit gender bias inherited from the training corpora. However, most studies to date have focused on quantifying and mitigating such bias only in English. These analyses cannot be directly extended to languages that exhibit morphological agreement on gender, such as Spanish and French. In this paper, we propose new metrics for evaluating gender bias in word embeddings of these languages and further demonstrate evidence of gender bias in bilingual embeddings which align these languages with English. Finally, we extend an existing approach to mitigate gender bias in word embedding of these languages under both monolingual and bilingual settings. Experiments on modified Word Embedding Association Test, word similarity, word translation, and word pair translation tasks show that the proposed approaches can effectively reduce the gender bias while preserving the utility of the original embeddings.