Shruti Bhargava


2024

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SynthDST: Synthetic Data is All You Need for Few-Shot Dialog State Tracking
Atharva Kulkarni | Bo-Hsiang Tseng | Joel Moniz | Dhivya Piraviperumal | Hong Yu | Shruti Bhargava
Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

In-context learning with Large Language Models (LLMs) has emerged as a promising avenue of research in Dialog State Tracking (DST). However, the best-performing in-context learning methods involve retrieving and adding similar examples to the prompt, requiring access to labeled training data. Procuring such training data for a wide range of domains and applications is time-consuming, expensive, and, at times, infeasible. While zero-shot learning requires no training data, it significantly lags behind the few-shot setup. Thus, ‘Can we efficiently generate synthetic data for any dialogue schema to enable few-shot prompting?' Addressing this question, we propose , a data generation framework tailored for DST, utilizing LLMs. Our approach only requires the dialogue schema and a few hand-crafted dialogue templates to synthesize natural, coherent, and free-flowing dialogues with DST annotations. Few-shot learning using data from results in 4-5% improvement in Joint Goal Accuracy over the zero-shot baseline on MultiWOZ 2.1 and 2.4. Remarkably, our few-shot learning approach recovers nearly 98% of the performance compared to the few-shot setup using human-annotated training data.

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Can Large Language Models Understand Context?
Yilun Zhu | Joel Moniz | Shruti Bhargava | Jiarui Lu | Dhivya Piraviperumal | Site Li | Yuan Zhang | Hong Yu | Bo-Hsiang Tseng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2024

Understanding context is key to understanding human language, an ability which Large Language Models (LLMs) have been increasingly seen to demonstrate to an impressive extent. However, though the evaluation of LLMs encompasses various domains within the realm of Natural Language Processing, limited attention has been paid to probing their linguistic capability of understanding contextual features. This paper introduces a context understanding benchmark by adapting existing datasets to suit the evaluation of generative models. This benchmark comprises of four distinct tasks and nine datasets, all featuring prompts designed to assess the models’ ability to understand context. First, we evaluate the performance of LLMs under the in-context learning pretraining scenario. Experimental results indicate that pre-trained dense models struggle with understanding more nuanced contextual features when compared to state-of-the-art fine-tuned models. Second, as LLM compression holds growing significance in both research and real-world applications, we assess the context understanding of quantized models under in-context-learning settings. We find that 3-bit post-training quantization leads to varying degrees of performance reduction on our benchmark. We conduct an extensive analysis of these scenarios to substantiate our experimental results.

2023

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MARRS: Multimodal Reference Resolution System
Halim Cagri Ates | Shruti Bhargava | Site Li | Jiarui Lu | Siddhardha Maddula | Joel Ruben Antony Moniz | Anil Kumar Nalamalapu | Roman Hoang Nguyen | Melis Ozyildirim | Alkesh Patel | Dhivya Piraviperumal | Vincent Renkens | Ankit Samal | Thy Tran | Bo-Hsiang Tseng | Hong Yu | Yuan Zhang | Shirley Zou
Proceedings of The Sixth Workshop on Computational Models of Reference, Anaphora and Coreference (CRAC 2023)

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Referring to Screen Texts with Voice Assistants
Shruti Bhargava | Anand Dhoot | Ing-marie Jonsson | Hoang Long Nguyen | Alkesh Patel | Hong Yu | Vincent Renkens
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 5: Industry Track)

Voice assistants help users make phone calls, send messages, create events, navigate and do a lot more. However assistants have limited capacity to understand their users’ context. In this work, we aim to take a step in this direction. Our work dives into a new experience for users to refer to phone numbers, addresses, email addresses, urls, and dates on their phone screens. We focus on reference understanding, which is particularly interesting when, similar to visual grounding, there are multiple similar texts on screen. We collect a dataset and propose a lightweight general purpose model for this novel experience. Since consuming pixels directly is expensive, our system is designed to rely only on text extracted from the UI. Our model is modular, offering flexibility, better interpretability and efficient run time memory.

2021

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CREAD: Combined Resolution of Ellipses and Anaphora in Dialogues
Bo-Hsiang Tseng | Shruti Bhargava | Jiarui Lu | Joel Ruben Antony Moniz | Dhivya Piraviperumal | Lin Li | Hong Yu
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Anaphora and ellipses are two common phenomena in dialogues. Without resolving referring expressions and information omission, dialogue systems may fail to generate consistent and coherent responses. Traditionally, anaphora is resolved by coreference resolution and ellipses by query rewrite. In this work, we propose a novel joint learning framework of modeling coreference resolution and query rewriting for complex, multi-turn dialogue understanding. Given an ongoing dialogue between a user and a dialogue assistant, for the user query, our joint learning model first predicts coreference links between the query and the dialogue context, and then generates a self-contained rewritten user query. To evaluate our model, we annotate a dialogue based coreference resolution dataset, MuDoCo, with rewritten queries. Results show that the performance of query rewrite can be substantially boosted (+2.3% F1) with the aid of coreference modeling. Furthermore, our joint model outperforms the state-of-the-art coreference resolution model (+2% F1) on this dataset.

2020

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Conversational Semantic Parsing for Dialog State Tracking
Jianpeng Cheng | Devang Agrawal | Héctor Martínez Alonso | Shruti Bhargava | Joris Driesen | Federico Flego | Dain Kaplan | Dimitri Kartsaklis | Lin Li | Dhivya Piraviperumal | Jason D. Williams | Hong Yu | Diarmuid Ó Séaghdha | Anders Johannsen
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

We consider a new perspective on dialog state tracking (DST), the task of estimating a user’s goal through the course of a dialog. By formulating DST as a semantic parsing task over hierarchical representations, we can incorporate semantic compositionality, cross-domain knowledge sharing and co-reference. We present TreeDST, a dataset of 27k conversations annotated with tree-structured dialog states and system acts. We describe an encoder-decoder framework for DST with hierarchical representations, which leads to ~20% improvement over state-of-the-art DST approaches that operate on a flat meaning space of slot-value pairs.