Emotion Recognition in Conversation (ERC) has been widely studied due to its importance in developing emotion-aware empathetic machines. The rise of pre-trained language models (PLMs) has further pushed the limit of ERC performance. However, most recent works on ERC using PLMs are heavily data-driven, and requires fine-tuning the entire PLMs. To improve both sample and computational efficiency, we propose a derivative-free optimization method called Cross-Task Prompt Tuning (CTPT) for few-shot conversational emotion recognition. Unlike existing methods that learn independent knowledge from individual tasks, CTPT leverages sharable cross-task knowledge by exploiting external knowledge from other source tasks to improve learning performance under the few-shot setting. Moreover, CTPT only needs to optimize a vector under the low intrinsic dimensionality without gradient, which is highly parameter-efficient compared with existing approaches. Experiments on five different contextual conversation datasets demonstrate that our CTPT method has superior results on both few-shot scenarios and zero-shot transfers.

Recently, the sequence-to-sequence models have made remarkable progress on the task of keyphrase generation (KG) by concatenating multiple keyphrases in a predefined order as a target sequence during training. However, the keyphrases are inherently an unordered set rather than an ordered sequence. Imposing a predefined order will introduce wrong bias during training, which can highly penalize shifts in the order between keyphrases. In this work, we propose a new training paradigm One2Set without predefining an order to concatenate the keyphrases. To fit this paradigm, we propose a novel model that utilizes a fixed set of learned control codes as conditions to generate a set of keyphrases in parallel. To solve the problem that there is no correspondence between each prediction and target during training, we propose a K-step label assignment mechanism via bipartite matching, which greatly increases the diversity and reduces the repetition rate of generated keyphrases. The experimental results on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

Aiming to generate a set of keyphrases, Keyphrase Generation (KG) is a classical task for capturing the central idea from a given document. Based on Seq2Seq models, the previous reinforcement learning framework on KG tasks utilizes the evaluation metrics to further improve the well-trained neural models. However, these KG evaluation metrics such as F₁@5 and F₁@M are only aware of the exact correctness of predictions on phrase-level and ignore the semantic similarities between similar predictions and targets, which inhibits the model from learning deep linguistic patterns. In response to this problem, we propose a new fine-grained evaluation metric to improve the RL framework, which considers different granularities: token-level F₁ score, edit distance, duplication, and prediction quantities. On the whole, the new framework includes two reward functions: the fine-grained evaluation score and the vanilla F₁ score. This framework helps the model identifying some partial match phrases which can be further optimized as the exact match ones. Experiments on KG benchmarks show that our proposed training framework outperforms the previous RL training frameworks among all evaluation scores. In addition, our method can effectively ease the synonym problem and generate a higher quality prediction. The source code is available at https://github.com/xuyige/FGRL4KG.