Despite advancements in conversational AI, language models encounter challenges to handle diverse conversational tasks, and existing dialogue dataset collections often lack diversity and comprehensiveness. To tackle these issues, we introduce DialogStudio: the largest and most diverse collection of dialogue datasets, unified under a consistent format while preserving their original information. Our collection encompasses data from open-domain dialogues, task-oriented dialogues, natural language understanding, conversational recommendation, dialogue summarization, and knowledge-grounded dialogues, making it an incredibly rich and diverse resource for dialogue research and model training.To further enhance the utility of DialogStudio, we identify the licenses for each dataset, design external knowledge and domain-aware prompts for selected dialogues to facilitate instruction-aware fine-tuning. To improve transparency and support dataset and task-based research, as well as language model pre-training, all datasets, licenses, codes, and models associated with DialogStudio will be made publicly accessible.

In this work, we study dialogue scenarios that start from chit-chat but eventually switch to task-related services, and investigate how a unified dialogue model, which can engage in both chit-chat and task-oriented dialogues, takes the initiative during the dialogue mode transition from chit-chat to task-oriented in a coherent and cooperative manner. We firstly build a transition info extractor (TIE) that keeps track of the preceding chit-chat interaction and detects the potential user intention to switch to a task-oriented service. Meanwhile, in the unified model, a transition sentence generator (TSG) is extended through efficient Adapter tuning and transition prompt learning. When the TIE successfully finds task-related information from the preceding chit-chat, such as a transition domain (“train” in Figure fig: system-initiated transition from chit-chat to task-oriented.), then the TSG is activated automatically in the unified model to initiate this transition by generating a transition sentence under the guidance of transition information extracted by TIE. The experimental results show promising performance regarding the proactive transitions. We achieve an additional large improvement on TIE model by utilizing Conditional Random Fields (CRF). The TSG can flexibly generate transition sentences while maintaining the unified capabilities of normal chit-chat and task-oriented response generation.

My research work centers on how to enable a human-like interaction through generating contextual, emotional or proactive responses, both in task-oriented and in chitchat spoken dialogue systems (SDSs), because natural lan- guage generation (NLG) is an indispensable component in SDSs and can directly affect the user interactive expe- rience of the entire dialogue system. In addition to NLG, I am also interested in natural language understanding (NLU), as it plays a crucial role in SDSs and is a prerequisite for dialogue systems to generate replies.

Hierarchical Text Classification (HTC) is an essential and challenging subtask of multi-label text classification with a taxonomic hierarchy. Recent advances in deep learning and pre-trained language models have led to significant breakthroughs in the HTC problem. However, despite their effectiveness, these methods are often restricted by a lack of domain knowledge, which leads them to make mistakes in a variety of situations. Generally, when manually classifying a specific document to the taxonomic hierarchy, experts make inference based on their prior knowledge and experience. For machines to achieve this capability, we propose a novel Knowledge-enabled Hierarchical Text Classification model (K-HTC), which incorporates knowledge graphs into HTC. Specifically, K-HTC innovatively integrates knowledge into both the text representation and hierarchical label learning process, addressing the knowledge limitations of traditional methods. Additionally, a novel knowledge-aware contrastive learning strategy is proposed to further exploit the information inherent in the data. Extensive experiments on two publicly available HTC datasets show the efficacy of our proposed method, and indicate the necessity of incorporating knowledge graphs in HTC tasks.

Entity Alignment, which aims to identify equivalent entities from various Knowledge Graphs (KGs), is a fundamental and crucial task in knowledge graph fusion. Existing methods typically use triple or neighbor information to represent entities, and then align those entities using similarity matching. Most of them, however, fail to account for the heterogeneity among KGs and the distinction between KG entities and relations. To better solve these problems, we propose a Relation-gated Heterogeneous Graph Network (RHGN) for entity alignment. Specifically, RHGN contains a relation-gated convolutional layer to distinguish relations and entities in the KG. In addition, RHGN adopts a cross-graph embedding exchange module and a soft relation alignment module to address the neighbor heterogeneity and relation heterogeneity between different KGs, respectively. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that RHGN is superior to existing state-of-the-art entity alignment methods.

The dominant paradigm of textual question answering systems is based on end-to-end neural networks, which excels at answering natural language questions but falls short on complex ones. This stands in contrast to the broad adaptation of semantic parsing approaches over structured data sources (e.g., relational database, knowledge graphs), that convert natural language questions to logical forms and execute them with query engines. Towards combining the strengths of neural and symbolic methods, we propose a framework of question parsing and execution on textual QA. It comprises two central pillars: (1) We parse the question of varying complexity into an intermediate representation, named H-expression, which is composed of simple questions as the primitives and symbolic operations representing the relationships among them; (2) To execute the resulting H-expressions, we design a hybrid executor, which integrates the deterministic rules to translate the symbolic operations with a drop-in neural reader network to answer each decomposed simple question. Hence, the proposed framework can be viewed as a top-down question parsing followed by a bottom-up answer backtracking. The resulting H-expressions closely guide the execution process, offering higher precision besides better interpretability while still preserving the advantages of the neural readers for resolving its primitive elements. Our extensive experiments on MuSiQue, 2WikiQA, HotpotQA, and NQ show that the proposed parsing and hybrid execution framework outperforms existing approaches in supervised, few-shot, and zero-shot settings, while also effectively exposing its underlying reasoning process.

While Chain-of-Thought prompting is popular in reasoning tasks, its application to Large Language Models (LLMs) in Natural Language Understanding (NLU) is under-explored. Motivated by multi-step reasoning of LLMs, we propose Coarse-to-Fine Chain-of-Thought (CoF-CoT) approach that breaks down NLU tasks into multiple reasoning steps where LLMs can learn to acquire and leverage essential concepts to solve tasks from different granularities. Moreover, we propose leveraging semantic-based Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) structured knowledge as an intermediate step to capture the nuances and diverse structures of utterances, and to understand connections between their varying levels of granularity. Our proposed approach is demonstrated effective in assisting the LLMs adapt to the multi-grained NLU tasks under both zero-shot and few-shot multi-domain settings.

Extracting structured information from videos is critical for numerous downstream applications in the industry. In this paper, we define a significant task of extracting hierarchical key information from visual texts on videos. To fulfill this task, we decouple it into four subtasks and introduce two implementation solutions called PipVKIE and UniVKIE. PipVKIE sequentially completes the four subtasks in continuous stages, while UniVKIE is improved by unifying all the subtasks into one backbone. Both PipVKIE and UniVKIE leverage multimodal information from vision, text, and coordinates for feature representation. Extensive experiments on one well-defined dataset demonstrate that our solutions can achieve remarkable performance and efficient inference speed.

Recent advanced methods in Natural Language Understanding for Task-oriented Dialogue (TOD) Systems (e.g., intent detection and slot filling) require a large amount of annotated data to achieve competitive performance. In reality, token-level annotations (slot labels) are time-consuming and difficult to acquire. In this work, we study the Slot Induction (SI) task whose objective is to induce slot boundaries without explicit knowledge of token-level slot annotations. We propose leveraging Unsupervised Pre-trained Language Model (PLM) Probing and Contrastive Learning mechanism to exploit (1) unsupervised semantic knowledge extracted from PLM, and (2) additional sentence-level intent label signals available from TOD. Our approach is shown to be effective in SI task and capable of bridging the gaps with token-level supervised models on two NLU benchmark datasets. When generalized to emerging intents, our SI objectives also provide enhanced slot label representations, leading to improved performance on the Slot Filling tasks.

Pre-trained Transformer-based models were reported to be robust in intent classification. In this work, we first point out the importance of in-domain out-of-scope detection in few-shot intent recognition tasks and then illustrate the vulnerability of pre-trained Transformer-based models against samples that are in-domain but out-of-scope (ID-OOS). We construct two new datasets, and empirically show that pre-trained models do not perform well on both ID-OOS examples and general out-of-scope examples, especially on fine-grained few-shot intent detection tasks.

Parsing natural language questions into executable logical forms is a useful and interpretable way to perform question answering on structured data such as knowledge bases (KB) or databases (DB). However, existing approaches on semantic parsing cannot adapt to both modalities, as they suffer from the exponential growth of the logical form candidates and can hardly generalize to unseen data.In this work, we propose Uni-Parser, a unified semantic parser for question answering (QA) on both KB and DB. We define the primitive (relation and entity in KB, and table name, column name and cell value in DB) as the essential element in our framework. The number of primitives grows only at a linear rate to the number of retrieved relations in KB and DB, preventing us from exponential logic form candidates. We leverage the generator to predict final logical forms by altering and composing top-ranked primitives with different operations (e.g. select, where, count). With sufficiently pruned search space by a contrastive primitive ranker, the generator is empowered to capture the composition of primitives enhancing its generalization ability. We achieve competitive results on multiple KB and DB QA benchmarks with more efficiency, especially in the compositional and zero-shot settings.

Multimodal headline utilizes both video frames and transcripts to generate the natural language title of the videos. Due to a lack of large-scale, manually annotated data, the task of annotating grounded headlines for video is labor intensive and impractical. Previous researches on pre-trained language models and video-language models have achieved significant progress in related downstream tasks. However, none of them can be directly applied to multimodal headline architecture where we need both multimodal encoder and sentence decoder. A major challenge in simply gluing language model and video-language model is the modality balance, which is aimed at combining visual-language complementary abilities. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to graft the video encoder from the pre-trained video-language model on the generative pre-trained language model. We also present a consensus fusion mechanism for the integration of different components, via inter/intra modality relation. Empirically, experiments show that the grafted model achieves strong results on a brand-new dataset collected from real-world applications.

The non-autoregressive models have boosted the efficiency of neural machine translation through parallelized decoding at the cost of effectiveness, when comparing with the autoregressive counterparts. In this paper, we claim that the syntactic and semantic structures among natural language are critical for non-autoregressive machine translation and can further improve the performance. However, these structures are rarely considered in the existing non-autoregressive models. Inspired by this intuition, we propose to incorporate the explicit syntactic and semantic structure of languages into a non-autoregressive Transformer, for the task of neural machine translation. Moreover, we also consider the intermediate latent alignment within target sentences to better learn the long-term token dependencies. Experimental results on two real-world datasets (i.e., WMT14 En-De and WMT16 En- Ro) show that our model achieves a significantly faster speed, as well as keeps the translation quality when compared with several state-of-the-art non-autoregressive models.

Dense neural text retrieval has achieved promising results on open-domain Question Answering (QA), where latent representations of questions and passages are exploited for maximum inner product search in the retrieval process. However, current dense retrievers require splitting documents into short passages that usually contain local, partial and sometimes biased context, and highly depend on the splitting process. As a consequence, it may yield inaccurate and misleading hidden representations, thus deteriorating the final retrieval result. In this work, we propose Dense Hierarchical Retrieval (DHR), a hierarchical framework which can generate accurate dense representations of passages by utilizing both macroscopic semantics in the document and microscopic semantics specific to each passage. Specifically, a document-level retriever first identifies relevant documents, among which relevant passages are then retrieved by a passage-level retriever. The ranking of the retrieved passages will be further calibrated by examining the document-level relevance. In addition, hierarchical title structure and two negative sampling strategies (i.e., In-Doc and In-Sec negatives) are investigated. We apply DHR to large-scale open-domain QA datasets. DHR significantly outperforms the original dense passage retriever, and helps an end-to-end QA system outperform the strong baselines on multiple open-domain QA benchmarks.

Few-shot table-to-text generation is a task of composing fluent and faithful sentences to convey table content using limited data. Despite many efforts having been made towards generating impressive fluent sentences by fine-tuning powerful pre-trained language models, the faithfulness of generated content still needs to be improved. To this end, this paper proposes a novel approach Attend, Memorize and Generate (called AMG), inspired by the text generation process of humans. In particular, AMG (1) attends over the multi-granularity of context using a novel strategy based on table slot level and traditional token-by-token level attention to exploit both the table structure and natural linguistic information; (2) dynamically memorizes the table slot allocation states; and (3) generates faithful sentences according to both the context and memory allocation states. Comprehensive experiments with human evaluation on three domains (i.e., humans, songs, and books) of the Wiki dataset show that our model can generate higher qualified texts when compared with several state-of-the-art baselines, in both fluency and faithfulness.

To capture the semantic graph structure from raw text, most existing summarization approaches are built on GNNs with a pre-trained model. However, these methods suffer from cumbersome procedures and inefficient computations for long-text documents. To mitigate these issues, this paper proposes HetFormer, a Transformer-based pre-trained model with multi-granularity sparse attentions for long-text extractive summarization. Specifically, we model different types of semantic nodes in raw text as a potential heterogeneous graph and directly learn heterogeneous relationships (edges) among nodes by Transformer. Extensive experiments on both single- and multi-document summarization tasks show that HetFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance in Rouge F1 while using less memory and fewer parameters.

This paper presents an automatic method to evaluate the naturalness of natural language generation in dialogue systems. While this task was previously rendered through expensive and time-consuming human labor, we present this novel task of automatic naturalness evaluation of generated language. By fine-tuning the BERT model, our proposed naturalness evaluation method shows robust results and outperforms the baselines: support vector machines, bi-directional LSTMs, and BLEURT. In addition, the training speed and evaluation performance of naturalness model are improved by transfer learning from quality and informativeness linguistic knowledge.

This work combines information about the dialogue history encoded by pre-trained model with a meaning representation of the current system utterance to realise contextual language generation in task-oriented dialogues. We utilise the pre-trained multi-context ConveRT model for context representation in a model trained from scratch; and leverage the immediate preceding user utterance for context generation in a model adapted from the pre-trained GPT-2. Both experiments with the MultiWOZ dataset show that contextual information encoded by pre-trained model improves the performance of response generation both in automatic metrics and human evaluation. Our presented contextual generator enables higher variety of generated responses that fit better to the ongoing dialogue. Analysing the context size shows that longer context does not automatically lead to better performance, but the immediate preceding user utterance plays an essential role for contextual generation. In addition, we also propose a re-ranker for the GPT-based generation model. The experiments show that the response selected by the re-ranker has a significant improvement on automatic metrics.

Human tackle reading comprehension not only based on the given context itself but often rely on the commonsense beyond. To empower the machine with commonsense reasoning, in this paper, we propose a Commonsense Evidence Generation and Injection framework in reading comprehension, named CEGI. The framework injects two kinds of auxiliary commonsense evidence into comprehensive reading to equip the machine with the ability of rational thinking. Specifically, we build two evidence generators: one aims to generate textual evidence via a language model; the other aims to extract factual evidence (automatically aligned text-triples) from a commonsense knowledge graph after graph completion. Those evidences incorporate contextual commonsense and serve as the additional inputs to the reasoning model. Thereafter, we propose a deep contextual encoder to extract semantic relationships among the paragraph, question, option, and evidence. Finally, we employ a capsule network to extract different linguistic units (word and phrase) from the relations, and dynamically predict the optimal option based on the extracted units. Experiments on the CosmosQA dataset demonstrate that the proposed CEGI model outperforms the current state-of-the-art approaches and achieves the highest accuracy (83.6%) on the leaderboard.

Open attribute value extraction for emerging entities is an important but challenging task. A lot of previous works formulate the problem as a question-answering (QA) task. While the collections of articles from web corpus provide updated information about the emerging entities, the retrieved texts can be noisy, irrelevant, thus leading to inaccurate answers. Effectively filtering out noisy articles as well as bad answers is the key to improve extraction accuracy. Knowledge graph (KG), which contains rich, well organized information about entities, provides a good resource to address the challenge. In this work, we propose a knowledge-guided reinforcement learning (RL) framework for open attribute value extraction. Informed by relevant knowledge in KG, we trained a deep Q-network to sequentially compare extracted answers to improve extraction accuracy. The proposed framework is applicable to different information extraction system. Our experimental results show that our method outperforms the baselines by 16.5 - 27.8%.

Automatic political orientation prediction from social media posts has to date proven successful only in distinguishing between publicly declared liberals and conservatives in the US. This study examines users’ political ideology using a seven-point scale which enables us to identify politically moderate and neutral users – groups which are of particular interest to political scientists and pollsters. Using a novel data set with political ideology labels self-reported through surveys, our goal is two-fold: a) to characterize the groups of politically engaged users through language use on Twitter; b) to build a fine-grained model that predicts political ideology of unseen users. Our results identify differences in both political leaning and engagement and the extent to which each group tweets using political keywords. Finally, we demonstrate how to improve ideology prediction accuracy by exploiting the relationships between the user groups.