Anusha Balakrishnan


2023

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The Whole Truth and Nothing But the Truth: Faithful and Controllable Dialogue Response Generation with Dataflow Transduction and Constrained Decoding
Hao Fang | Anusha Balakrishnan | Harsh Jhamtani | John Bufe | Jean Crawford | Jayant Krishnamurthy | Adam Pauls | Jason Eisner | Jacob Andreas | Dan Klein
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

In a real-world dialogue system, generated text must be truthful and informative while remaining fluent and adhering to a prescribed style. Satisfying these constraints simultaneously isdifficult for the two predominant paradigms in language generation: neural language modeling and rule-based generation. We describe a hybrid architecture for dialogue response generation that combines the strengths of both paradigms. The first component of this architecture is a rule-based content selection model defined using a new formal framework called dataflow transduction, which uses declarative rules to transduce a dialogue agent’s actions and their results (represented as dataflow graphs) into context-free grammars representing the space of contextually acceptable responses. The second component is a constrained decoding procedure that uses these grammars to constrain the output of a neural language model, which selects fluent utterances. Our experiments show that this system outperforms both rule-based and learned approaches in human evaluations of fluency, relevance, and truthfulness.

2019

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Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Discourse Structure in Neural NLG
Anusha Balakrishnan | Vera Demberg | Chandra Khatri | Abhinav Rastogi | Donia Scott | Marilyn Walker | Michael White
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Discourse Structure in Neural NLG

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A Tree-to-Sequence Model for Neural NLG in Task-Oriented Dialog
Jinfeng Rao | Kartikeya Upasani | Anusha Balakrishnan | Michael White | Anuj Kumar | Rajen Subba
Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Natural Language Generation

Generating fluent natural language responses from structured semantic representations is a critical step in task-oriented conversational systems. Sequence-to-sequence models on flat meaning representations (MR) have been dominant in this task, for example in the E2E NLG Challenge. Previous work has shown that a tree-structured MR can improve the model for better discourse-level structuring and sentence-level planning. In this work, we propose a tree-to-sequence model that uses a tree-LSTM encoder to leverage the tree structures in the input MR, and further enhance the decoding by a structure-enhanced attention mechanism. In addition, we explore combining these enhancements with constrained decoding to improve semantic correctness. Our experiments not only show significant improvements over standard seq2seq baselines, but also is more data-efficient and generalizes better to hard scenarios.

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Constrained Decoding for Neural NLG from Compositional Representations in Task-Oriented Dialogue
Anusha Balakrishnan | Jinfeng Rao | Kartikeya Upasani | Michael White | Rajen Subba
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Generating fluent natural language responses from structured semantic representations is a critical step in task-oriented conversational systems. Avenues like the E2E NLG Challenge have encouraged the development of neural approaches, particularly sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) models for this problem. The semantic representations used, however, are often underspecified, which places a higher burden on the generation model for sentence planning, and also limits the extent to which generated responses can be controlled in a live system. In this paper, we (1) propose using tree-structured semantic representations, like those used in traditional rule-based NLG systems, for better discourse-level structuring and sentence-level planning; (2) introduce a challenging dataset using this representation for the weather domain; (3) introduce a constrained decoding approach for Seq2Seq models that leverages this representation to improve semantic correctness; and (4) demonstrate promising results on our dataset and the E2E dataset.

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Recommendation as a Communication Game: Self-Supervised Bot-Play for Goal-oriented Dialogue
Dongyeop Kang | Anusha Balakrishnan | Pararth Shah | Paul Crook | Y-Lan Boureau | Jason Weston
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Traditional recommendation systems produce static rather than interactive recommendations invariant to a user’s specific requests, clarifications, or current mood, and can suffer from the cold-start problem if their tastes are unknown. These issues can be alleviated by treating recommendation as an interactive dialogue task instead, where an expert recommender can sequentially ask about someone’s preferences, react to their requests, and recommend more appropriate items. In this work, we collect a goal-driven recommendation dialogue dataset (GoRecDial), which consists of 9,125 dialogue games and 81,260 conversation turns between pairs of human workers recommending movies to each other. The task is specifically designed as a cooperative game between two players working towards a quantifiable common goal. We leverage the dataset to develop an end-to-end dialogue system that can simultaneously converse and recommend. Models are first trained to imitate the behavior of human players without considering the task goal itself (supervised training). We then finetune our models on simulated bot-bot conversations between two paired pre-trained models (bot-play), in order to achieve the dialogue goal. Our experiments show that models finetuned with bot-play learn improved dialogue strategies, reach the dialogue goal more often when paired with a human, and are rated as more consistent by humans compared to models trained without bot-play. The dataset and code are publicly available through the ParlAI framework.

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The OSU/Facebook Realizer for SRST 2019: Seq2Seq Inflection and Serialized Tree2Tree Linearization
Kartikeya Upasani | David King | Jinfeng Rao | Anusha Balakrishnan | Michael White
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Multilingual Surface Realisation (MSR 2019)

We describe our exploratory system for the shallow surface realization task, which combines morphological inflection using character sequence-to-sequence models with a baseline linearizer that implements a tree-to-tree model using sequence-to-sequence models on serialized trees. Results for morphological inflection were competitive across languages. Due to time constraints, we could only submit complete results (including linearization) for English. Preliminary linearization results were decent, with a small benefit from reranking to prefer valid output trees, but inadequate control over the words in the output led to poor quality on longer sentences.

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Generate, Filter, and Rank: Grammaticality Classification for Production-Ready NLG Systems
Ashwini Challa | Kartikeya Upasani | Anusha Balakrishnan | Rajen Subba
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 2 (Industry Papers)

Neural approaches to Natural Language Generation (NLG) have been promising for goal-oriented dialogue. One of the challenges of productionizing these approaches, however, is the ability to control response quality, and ensure that generated responses are acceptable. We propose the use of a generate, filter, and rank framework, in which candidate responses are first filtered to eliminate unacceptable responses, and then ranked to select the best response. While acceptability includes grammatical correctness and semantic correctness, we focus only on grammaticality classification in this paper, and show that existing datasets for grammatical error correction don’t correctly capture the distribution of errors that data-driven generators are likely to make. We release a grammatical classification and semantic correctness classification dataset for the weather domain that consists of responses generated by 3 data-driven NLG systems. We then explore two supervised learning approaches (CNNs and GBDTs) for classifying grammaticality. Our experiments show that grammaticality classification is very sensitive to the distribution of errors in the data, and that these distributions vary significantly with both the source of the response as well as the domain. We show that it’s possible to achieve high precision with reasonable recall on our dataset.

2018

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Decoupling Strategy and Generation in Negotiation Dialogues
He He | Derek Chen | Anusha Balakrishnan | Percy Liang
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

We consider negotiation settings in which two agents use natural language to bargain on goods. Agents need to decide on both high-level strategy (e.g., proposing $50) and the execution of that strategy (e.g., generating “The bike is brand new. Selling for just $50!”). Recent work on negotiation trains neural models, but their end-to-end nature makes it hard to control their strategy, and reinforcement learning tends to lead to degenerate solutions. In this paper, we propose a modular approach based on coarse dialogue acts (e.g., propose(price=50)) that decouples strategy and generation. We show that we can flexibly set the strategy using supervised learning, reinforcement learning, or domain-specific knowledge without degeneracy, while our retrieval-based generation can maintain context-awareness and produce diverse utterances. We test our approach on the recently proposed DEALORNODEAL game, and we also collect a richer dataset based on real items on Craigslist. Human evaluation shows that our systems achieve higher task success rate and more human-like negotiation behavior than previous approaches.

2017

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Learning Symmetric Collaborative Dialogue Agents with Dynamic Knowledge Graph Embeddings
He He | Anusha Balakrishnan | Mihail Eric | Percy Liang
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

We study a symmetric collaborative dialogue setting in which two agents, each with private knowledge, must strategically communicate to achieve a common goal. The open-ended dialogue state in this setting poses new challenges for existing dialogue systems. We collected a dataset of 11K human-human dialogues, which exhibits interesting lexical, semantic, and strategic elements. To model both structured knowledge and unstructured language, we propose a neural model with dynamic knowledge graph embeddings that evolve as the dialogue progresses. Automatic and human evaluations show that our model is both more effective at achieving the goal and more human-like than baseline neural and rule-based models.

2014

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Documenting Endangered Languages with the WordsEye Linguistics Tool
Morgan Ulinski | Anusha Balakrishnan | Daniel Bauer | Bob Coyne | Julia Hirschberg | Owen Rambow
Proceedings of the 2014 Workshop on the Use of Computational Methods in the Study of Endangered Languages

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WELT: Using Graphics Generation in Linguistic Fieldwork
Morgan Ulinski | Anusha Balakrishnan | Bob Coyne | Julia Hirschberg | Owen Rambow
Proceedings of 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations