Joseph Peper


2022

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One Agent To Rule Them All: Towards Multi-agent Conversational AI
Christopher Clarke | Joseph Peper | Karthik Krishnamurthy | Walter Talamonti | Kevin Leach | Walter Lasecki | Yiping Kang | Lingjia Tang | Jason Mars
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022

The increasing volume of commercially available conversational agents (CAs) on the market has resulted in users being burdened with learning and adopting multiple agents to accomplish their tasks. Though prior work has explored supporting a multitude of domains within the design of a single agent, the interaction experience suffers due to the large action space of desired capabilities. To address these problems, we introduce a new task BBAI: Black-Box Agent Integration, focusing on combining the capabilities of multiple black-box CAs at scale. We explore two techniques: question agent pairing and question response pairing aimed at resolving this task. Leveraging these techniques, we design One For All (OFA), a scalable system that provides a unified interface to interact with multiple CAs. Additionally, we introduce MARS: Multi-Agent Response Selection, a new encoder model for question response pairing that jointly encodes user question and agent response pairs. We demonstrate that OFA is able to automatically and accurately integrate an ensemble of commercially available CAs spanning disparate domains. Specifically, using the MARS encoder we achieve the highest accuracy on our BBAI task, outperforming strong baselines.

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Generative Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis with Contrastive Learning and Expressive Structure
Joseph Peper | Lu Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

Generative models have demonstrated impressive results on Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) tasks, particularly for the emerging task of extracting Aspect-Category-Opinion-Sentiment (ACOS) quadruples. However, these models struggle with implicit sentiment expressions, which are commonly observed in opinionated content such as online reviews. In this work, we introduce GEN-SCL-NAT, which consists of two techniques for improved structured generation for ACOS quadruple extraction. First, we propose GEN-SCL, a supervised contrastive learning objective that aids quadruple prediction by encouraging the model to produce input representations that are discriminable across key input attributes, such as sentiment polarity and the existence of implicit opinions and aspects. Second, we introduce GEN-NAT, a new structured generation format that better adapts pre-trained autoregressive encoder-decoder models to extract quadruples in a generative fashion. Experimental results show that GEN-SCL-NAT achieves top performance across three ACOS datasets, averaging 1.48% F1 improvement, with a maximum 1.73% increase on the LAPTOP-L1 dataset. Additionally, we see significant gains on implicit aspect and opinion splits that have been shown as challenging for existing ACOS approaches.