While recently developed NLP explainability methods let us open the black box in various ways (Madsen et al., 2022), a missing ingredient in this endeavor is an interactive tool offering a conversational interface. Such a dialogue system can help users explore datasets and models with explanations in a contextualized manner, e.g. via clarification or follow-up questions, and through a natural language interface. We adapt the conversational explanation framework TalkToModel (Slack et al., 2022) to the NLP domain, add new NLP-specific operations such as free-text rationalization, and illustrate its generalizability on three NLP tasks (dialogue act classification, question answering, hate speech detection). To recognize user queries for explanations, we evaluate fine-tuned and few-shot prompting models and implement a novel adapter-based approach. We then conduct two user studies on (1) the perceived correctness and helpfulness of the dialogues, and (2) the simulatability, i.e. how objectively helpful dialogical explanations are for humans in figuring out the model’s predicted label when it’s not shown. We found rationalization and feature attribution were helpful in explaining the model behavior. Moreover, users could more reliably predict the model outcome based on an explanation dialogue rather than one-off explanations.

In multimodal understanding tasks, visual and linguistic ambiguities can arise. Visual ambiguity can occur when visual objects require a model to ground a referring expression in a video without strong supervision, while linguistic ambiguity can occur from changes in entities in action flows. As an example from the cooking domain, “oil” mixed with “salt” and “pepper” could later be referred to as a “mixture”. Without a clear visual-linguistic alignment, we cannot know which among several objects shown is referred to by the language expression “mixture”, and without resolved antecedents, we cannot pinpoint what the mixture is. We define this chicken-and-egg problem as Visual-linguistic Ambiguity. In this paper, we present Find2Find, a joint anaphora resolution and object localization dataset targeting the problem of visual-linguistic ambiguity, consisting of 500 anaphora-annotated recipes with corresponding videos. We present experimental results of a novel end-to-end joint multitask learning framework for Find2Find that fuses visual and textual information and shows improvements both for anaphora resolution and object localization with one joint model in multitask learning, as compared to a strong single-task baseline.

Linguistic ambiguities arising from changes in entities in action flows are a key challenge in instructional cooking videos. In particular, temporally evolving entities present rich and to date understudied challenges for anaphora resolution. For example “oil” mixed with “salt” is later referred to as a “mixture”. In this paper we propose novel annotation guidelines to annotate recipes for the anaphora resolution task, reflecting change in entities. Moreover, we present experimental results for end-to-end multimodal anaphora resolution with the new annotation scheme and propose the use of temporal features for performance improvement.

Metric-based learning is a well-known family of methods for few-shot learning, especially in computer vision. Recently, they have been used in many natural language processing applications but not for slot tagging. In this paper, we explore metric-based learning methods in the slot tagging task and propose a novel metric-based learning architecture - Attentive Relational Network. Our proposed method extends relation networks, making them more suitable for natural language processing applications in general, by leveraging pretrained contextual embeddings such as ELMO and BERT and by using attention mechanism. The results on SNIPS data show that our proposed method outperforms other state of the art metric-based learning methods.

We describe the system developed by the DFKI-TalkingRobots Team for the CODI-CRAC 2021 Shared-Task on anaphora resolution in dialogue. Our system consists of three subsystems: (1) the Workspace Coreference System (WCS) incrementally clusters mentions using semantic similarity based on embeddings combined with lexical feature heuristics; (2) the Mention-to-Mention (M2M) coreference resolution system pairs same entity mentions; (3) the Discourse Deixis Resolution (DDR) system employs a Siamese Network to detect discourse anaphor-antecedent pairs. WCS achieved F1-score of 55.6% averaged across the evaluation test sets, M2M achieved 57.2% and DDR achieved 21.5%.

We compare our team’s systems to others submitted for the CODI-CRAC 2021 Shared-Task on anaphora resolution in dialogue. We analyse the architectures and performance, report some problematic cases in gold annotations, and suggest possible improvements of the systems, their evaluation, data annotation, and the organization of the shared task.

Learning-based slot filling - a key component of spoken language understanding systems - typically requires a large amount of in-domain hand-labeled data for training. In this paper, we propose a novel two-stage model architecture that can be trained with only a few in-domain hand-labeled examples. The first step is designed to remove non-slot tokens (i.e., O labeled tokens), as they introduce noise in the input of slot filling models. This step is domain-agnostic and therefore, can be trained by exploiting out-of-domain data. The second step identifies slot names only for slot tokens by using state-of-the-art pretrained contextual embeddings such as ELMO and BERT. We show that our approach outperforms other state-of-art systems on the SNIPS benchmark dataset.

We simulate first- and second-order context overlap and show that Skip-Gram with Negative Sampling is similar to Singular Value Decomposition in capturing second-order co-occurrence information, while Pointwise Mutual Information is agnostic to it. We support the results with an empirical study finding that the models react differently when provided with additional second-order information. Our findings reveal a basic property of Skip-Gram with Negative Sampling and point towards an explanation of its success on a variety of tasks.