Michiel van der Meer


2023

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Leveraging Few-Shot Data Augmentation and Waterfall Prompting for Response Generation
Lea Krause | Selene Báez Santamaría | Michiel van der Meer | Urja Khurana
Proceedings of The Eleventh Dialog System Technology Challenge

This paper discusses our approaches for task-oriented conversational modelling using subjective knowledge, with a particular emphasis on response generation. Our methodology was shaped by an extensive data analysis that evaluated key factors such as response length, sentiment, and dialogue acts present in the provided dataset. We used few-shot learning to augment the data with newly generated subjective knowledge items and present three approaches for DSTC11: (1) task-specific model exploration, (2) incorporation of the most frequent question into all generated responses, and (3) a waterfall prompting technique using a combination of both GPT-3 and ChatGPT.

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Do Differences in Values Influence Disagreements in Online Discussions?
Michiel van der Meer | Piek Vossen | Catholijn Jonker | Pradeep Murukannaiah
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Disagreements are common in online discussions. Disagreement may foster collaboration and improve the quality of a discussion under some conditions. Although there exist methods for recognizing disagreement, a deeper understanding of factors that influence disagreement is lacking in the literature. We investigate a hypothesis that differences in personal values are indicative of disagreement in online discussions. We show how state-of-the-art models can be used for estimating values in online discussions and how the estimated values can be aggregated into value profiles. We evaluate the estimated value profiles based on human-annotated agreement labels. We find that the dissimilarity of value profiles correlates with disagreement in specific cases. We also find that including value information in agreement prediction improves performance.

2022

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Will It Blend? Mixing Training Paradigms & Prompting for Argument Quality Prediction
Michiel van der Meer | Myrthe Reuver | Urja Khurana | Lea Krause | Selene Baez Santamaria
Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Argument Mining

This paper describes our contributions to the Shared Task of the 9th Workshop on Argument Mining (2022). Our approach uses Large Language Models for the task of Argument Quality Prediction. We perform prompt engineering using GPT-3, and also investigate the training paradigms multi-task learning, contrastive learning, and intermediate-task training. We find that a mixed prediction setup outperforms single models. Prompting GPT-3 works best for predicting argument validity, and argument novelty is best estimated by a model trained using all three training paradigms.