Lei Shen


2022

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Few-Shot Table Understanding: A Benchmark Dataset and Pre-Training Baseline
Ruixue Liu | Shaozu Yuan | Aijun Dai | Lei Shen | Tiangang Zhu | Meng Chen | Xiaodong He
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Few-shot table understanding is a critical and challenging problem in real-world scenario as annotations over large amount of tables are usually costly. Pre-trained language models (PLMs), which have recently flourished on tabular data, have demonstrated their effectiveness for table understanding tasks. However, few-shot table understanding is rarely explored due to the deficiency of public table pre-training corpus and well-defined downstream benchmark tasks, especially in Chinese. In this paper, we establish a benchmark dataset, FewTUD, which consists of 5 different tasks with human annotations to systematically explore the few-shot table understanding in depth. Since there is no large number of public Chinese tables, we also collect a large-scale, multi-domain tabular corpus to facilitate future Chinese table pre-training, which includes one million tables and related natural language text with auxiliary supervised interaction signals. Finally, we present FewTPT, a novel table PLM with rich interactions over tabular data, and evaluate its performance comprehensively on the benchmark. Our dataset and model will be released to the public soon.

2021

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CoLV: A Collaborative Latent Variable Model for Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Generation
Haolan Zhan | Lei Shen | Hongshen Chen | Hainan Zhang
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Knowledge-grounded dialogue generation has achieved promising performance with the engagement of external knowledge sources. Typical approaches towards this task usually perform relatively independent two sub-tasks, i.e., knowledge selection and knowledge-aware response generation. In this paper, in order to improve the diversity of both knowledge selection and knowledge-aware response generation, we propose a collaborative latent variable (CoLV) model to integrate these two aspects simultaneously in separate yet collaborative latent spaces, so as to capture the inherent correlation between knowledge selection and response generation. During generation, our proposed model firstly draws knowledge candidate from the latent space conditioned on the dialogue context, and then samples a response from another collaborative latent space conditioned on both the context and the selected knowledge. Experimental results on two widely-used knowledge-grounded dialogue datasets show that our model outperforms previous methods on both knowledge selection and response generation.

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Constructing Emotional Consensus and Utilizing Unpaired Data for Empathetic Dialogue Generation
Lei Shen | Jinchao Zhang | Jiao Ou | Xiaofang Zhao | Jie Zhou
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

Researches on dialogue empathy aim to endow an agent with the capacity of accurate understanding and proper responding for emotions. Existing models for empathetic dialogue generation focus on the emotion flow in one direction, that is, from the context to response. We argue that conducting an empathetic conversation is a bidirectional process, where empathy occurs when the emotions of two interlocutors could converge on the same point, i.e., reaching an emotional consensus. Besides, we also find that the empathetic dialogue corpus is extremely limited, which further restricts the model performance. To address the above issues, we propose a dual-generative model, Dual-Emp, to simultaneously construct the emotional consensus and utilize some external unpaired data. Specifically, our model integrates a forward dialogue model, a backward dialogue model, and a discrete latent variable representing the emotional consensus into a unified architecture. Then, to alleviate the constraint of paired data, we extract unpaired emotional data from open-domain conversations and employ Dual-Emp to produce pseudo paired empathetic samples, which is more efficient and low-cost than the human annotation. Automatic and human evaluations demonstrate that our method outperforms competitive baselines in producing coherent and empathetic responses.

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GTM: A Generative Triple-wise Model for Conversational Question Generation
Lei Shen | Fandong Meng | Jinchao Zhang | Yang Feng | Jie Zhou
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Generating some appealing questions in open-domain conversations is an effective way to improve human-machine interactions and lead the topic to a broader or deeper direction. To avoid dull or deviated questions, some researchers tried to utilize answer, the “future” information, to guide question generation. However, they separate a post-question-answer (PQA) triple into two parts: post-question (PQ) and question-answer (QA) pairs, which may hurt the overall coherence. Besides, the QA relationship is modeled as a one-to-one mapping that is not reasonable in open-domain conversations. To tackle these problems, we propose a generative triple-wise model with hierarchical variations for open-domain conversational question generation (CQG). Latent variables in three hierarchies are used to represent the shared background of a triple and one-to-many semantic mappings in both PQ and QA pairs. Experimental results on a large-scale CQG dataset show that our method significantly improves the quality of questions in terms of fluency, coherence and diversity over competitive baselines.

2020

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CDL: Curriculum Dual Learning for Emotion-Controllable Response Generation
Lei Shen | Yang Feng
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Emotion-controllable response generation is an attractive and valuable task that aims to make open-domain conversations more empathetic and engaging. Existing methods mainly enhance the emotion expression by adding regularization terms to standard cross-entropy loss and thus influence the training process. However, due to the lack of further consideration of content consistency, the common problem of response generation tasks, safe response, is intensified. Besides, query emotions that can help model the relationship between query and response are simply ignored in previous models, which would further hurt the coherence. To alleviate these problems, we propose a novel framework named Curriculum Dual Learning (CDL) which extends the emotion-controllable response generation to a dual task to generate emotional responses and emotional queries alternatively. CDL utilizes two rewards focusing on emotion and content to improve the duality. Additionally, it applies curriculum learning to gradually generate high-quality responses based on the difficulties of expressing various emotions. Experimental results show that CDL significantly outperforms the baselines in terms of coherence, diversity, and relation to emotion factors.

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The JDDC Corpus: A Large-Scale Multi-Turn Chinese Dialogue Dataset for E-commerce Customer Service
Meng Chen | Ruixue Liu | Lei Shen | Shaozu Yuan | Jingyan Zhou | Youzheng Wu | Xiaodong He | Bowen Zhou
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

Human conversations are complicated and building a human-like dialogue agent is an extremely challenging task. With the rapid development of deep learning techniques, data-driven models become more and more prevalent which need a huge amount of real conversation data. In this paper, we construct a large-scale real scenario Chinese E-commerce conversation corpus, JDDC, with more than 1 million multi-turn dialogues, 20 million utterances, and 150 million words. The dataset reflects several characteristics of human-human conversations, e.g., goal-driven, and long-term dependency among the context. It also covers various dialogue types including task-oriented, chitchat and question-answering. Extra intent information and three well-annotated challenge sets are also provided. Then, we evaluate several retrieval-based and generative models to provide basic benchmark performance on the JDDC corpus. And we hope JDDC can serve as an effective testbed and benefit the development of fundamental research in dialogue task.

2019

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Modeling Semantic Relationship in Multi-turn Conversations with Hierarchical Latent Variables
Lei Shen | Yang Feng | Haolan Zhan
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Multi-turn conversations consist of complex semantic structures, and it is still a challenge to generate coherent and diverse responses given previous utterances. It’s practical that a conversation takes place under a background, meanwhile, the query and response are usually most related and they are consistent in topic but also different in content. However, little work focuses on such hierarchical relationship among utterances. To address this problem, we propose a Conversational Semantic Relationship RNN (CSRR) model to construct the dependency explicitly. The model contains latent variables in three hierarchies. The discourse-level one captures the global background, the pair-level one stands for the common topic information between query and response, and the utterance-level ones try to represent differences in content. Experimental results show that our model significantly improves the quality of responses in terms of fluency, coherence, and diversity compared to baseline methods.

2018

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Speeding Up Neural Machine Translation Decoding by Cube Pruning
Wen Zhang | Liang Huang | Yang Feng | Lei Shen | Qun Liu
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Although neural machine translation has achieved promising results, it suffers from slow translation speed. The direct consequence is that a trade-off has to be made between translation quality and speed, thus its performance can not come into full play. We apply cube pruning, a popular technique to speed up dynamic programming, into neural machine translation to speed up the translation. To construct the equivalence class, similar target hidden states are combined, leading to less RNN expansion operations on the target side and less softmax operations over the large target vocabulary. The experiments show that, at the same or even better translation quality, our method can translate faster compared with naive beam search by 3.3x on GPUs and 3.5x on CPUs.