Despite the recent advances in open-domain dialogue systems, building a reliable evaluation metric is still a challenging problem. Recent studies proposed learnable metrics based on classification models trained to distinguish the correct response. However, neural classifiers are known to make overly confident predictions for examples from unseen distributions. We propose DENSITY, which evaluates a response by utilizing density estimation on the feature space derived from a neural classifier. Our metric measures how likely a response would appear in the distribution of human conversations. Moreover, to improve the performance of DENSITY, we utilize contrastive learning to further compress the feature space. Experiments on multiple response evaluation datasets show that DENSITY correlates better with human evaluations than the existing metrics.

Style control, content preservation, and fluency determine the quality of text style transfer models. To train on a nonparallel corpus, several existing approaches aim to deceive the style discriminator with an adversarial loss. However, adversarial training significantly degrades fluency compared to the other two metrics. In this work, we explain this phenomenon using energy-based interpretation, and leverage a pretrained language model to improve fluency. Specifically, we propose a novel approach which applies the pretrained language model to the text style transfer framework by restructuring the discriminator and the model itself, allowing the generator and the discriminator to also take advantage of the power of the pretrained model. We evaluated our model on three public benchmarks GYAFC, Amazon, and Yelp and achieved state-of-the-art performance on the overall metrics.

In retrieval-based dialogue systems, a response selection model acts as a ranker to select the most appropriate response among several candidates. However, such selection models tend to rely on context-response content similarity, which makes models vulnerable to adversarial responses that are semantically similar but not relevant to the dialogue context. Recent studies have shown that leveraging these adversarial responses as negative training samples is useful for improving the discriminating power of the selection model. Nevertheless, collecting human-written adversarial responses is expensive, and existing synthesizing methods often have limited scalability. To overcome these limitations, this paper proposes a simple but efficient method for generating adversarial negative responses leveraging a large-scale language model. Experimental results on dialogue selection tasks show that our method outperforms other methods of synthesizing adversarial negative responses. These results suggest that our method can be an effective alternative to human annotators in generating adversarial responses. Our code and dataset will be released if the paper is accepted.

Semantically meaningful sentence embeddings are important for numerous tasks in natural language processing. To obtain such embeddings, recent studies explored the idea of utilizing synthetically generated data from pretrained language models(PLMs) as a training corpus. However, PLMs often generate sentences different from the ones written by human. We hypothesize that treating all these synthetic examples equally for training can have an adverse effect on learning semantically meaningful embeddings. To analyze this, we first train a classifier that identifies machine-written sentences and observe that the linguistic features of the sentences identified as written by a machine are significantly different from those of human-written sentences. Based on this, we propose a novel approach that first trains the classifier to measure the importance of each sentence. The distilled information from the classifier is then used to train a reliable sentence embedding model. Through extensive evaluation on four real-world datasets, we demonstrate that our model trained on synthetic data generalizes well and outperforms the baselines.

Evaluating the quality of responses generated by open-domain conversation systems is a challenging task. This is partly because there can be multiple appropriate responses to a given dialogue history. Reference-based metrics that rely on comparisons to a set of known correct responses often fail to account for this variety, and consequently correlate poorly with human judgment. To address this problem, researchers have investigated the possibility of assessing response quality without using a set of known correct responses. RUBER demonstrated that an automatic response evaluation model could be made using unsupervised learning for the next-utterance prediction (NUP) task. For the unsupervised learning of such model, we propose a method of manipulating a golden response to create a new negative response that is designed to be inappropriate within the context while maintaining high similarity with the original golden response. We find, from our experiments on English datasets, that using the negative samples generated by our method alongside random negative samples can increase the model’s correlation with human evaluations. The process of generating such negative samples is automated and does not rely on human annotation.

One of the challenges in information retrieval (IR) is the vocabulary mismatch problem, which happens when the terms between queries and documents are lexically different but semantically similar. While recent work has proposed to expand the queries or documents by enriching their representations with additional relevant terms to address this challenge, they usually require a large volume of query-document pairs to train an expansion model. In this paper, we propose an Unsupervised Document Expansion with Generation (UDEG) framework with a pre-trained language model, which generates diverse supplementary sentences for the original document without using labels on query-document pairs for training. For generating sentences, we further stochastically perturb their embeddings to generate more diverse sentences for document expansion. We validate our framework on two standard IR benchmark datasets. The results show that our framework significantly outperforms relevant expansion baselines for IR.

Considering diverse aspects of an argumentative issue is an essential step for mitigating a biased opinion and making reasonable decisions. A related generation model can produce flexible results that cover a wide range of topics, compared to the retrieval-based method that may show unstable performance for unseen data. In this paper, we study the problem of generating sentential arguments from multiple perspectives, and propose a neural method to address this problem. Our model, ArgDiver (Argument generation model from diverse perspectives), in a way a conversational system, successfully generates high-quality sentential arguments. At the same time, the automatically generated arguments by our model show a higher diversity than those generated by any other baseline models. We believe that our work provides evidence for the potential of a good generation model in providing diverse perspectives on a controversial topic.