@inproceedings{sicilia-alikhani-2022-leather,
    title = "{LEATHER}: A Framework for Learning to Generate Human-like Text in Dialogue",
    author = "Sicilia, Anthony  and
      Alikhani, Malihe",
    editor = "He, Yulan  and
      Ji, Heng  and
      Li, Sujian  and
      Liu, Yang  and
      Chang, Chua-Hui",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: AACL-IJCNLP 2022",
    month = nov,
    year = "2022",
    address = "Online only",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2022.findings-aacl.4/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2022.findings-aacl.4",
    pages = "30--53",
    abstract = "Algorithms for text-generation in dialogue can be misguided. For example, in task-oriented settings, reinforcement learning that optimizes only task-success can lead to abysmal lexical diversity. We hypothesize this is due to poor theoretical understanding of the objectives in text-generation and their relation to the learning process (i.e., model training). To this end, we propose a new theoretical framework for learning to generate text in dialogue. Compared to existing theories of learning, our framework allows for analysis of the multi-faceted goals inherent to text-generation. We use our framework to develop theoretical guarantees for learners that adapt to unseen data. As an example, we apply our theory to study data-shift within a cooperative learning algorithm proposed for the GuessWhat?! visual dialogue game. From this insight, we propose a new algorithm, and empirically, we demonstrate our proposal improves both task-success and human-likeness of the generated text. Finally, we show statistics from our theory are empirically predictive of multiple qualities of the generated dialogue, suggesting our theory is useful for model-selection when human evaluations are not available."
}