The task of query rewrite aims to convert an in-context query to its fully-specified version where ellipsis and coreference are completed and referred-back according to the history context. Although much progress has been made, less efforts have been paid to real scenario conversations that involve drawing information from more than one modalities. In this paper, we propose the task of multimodal conversational query rewrite (McQR), which performs query rewrite under the multimodal visual conversation setting. We collect a large-scale dataset named McQueen based on manual annotation, which contains 15k visual conversations and over 80k queries where each one is associated with a fully-specified rewrite version. In addition, for entities appearing in the rewrite, we provide the corresponding image box annotation. We then use the McQueen dataset to benchmark a state-of-the-art method for effectively tackling the McQR task, which is based on a multimodal pre-trained model with pointer generator. Extensive experiments are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of our model on this task.

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) has been extensively studied in recent years, which typically involves four fundamental sentiment elements, including the aspect category, aspect term, opinion term, and sentiment polarity. Existing studies usually consider the detection of partial sentiment elements, instead of predicting the four elements in one shot. In this work, we introduce the Aspect Sentiment Quad Prediction (ASQP) task, aiming to jointly detect all sentiment elements in quads for a given opinionated sentence, which can reveal a more comprehensive and complete aspect-level sentiment structure. We further propose a novel Paraphrase modeling paradigm to cast the ASQP task to a paraphrase generation process. On one hand, the generation formulation allows solving ASQP in an end-to-end manner, alleviating the potential error propagation in the pipeline solution. On the other hand, the semantics of the sentiment elements can be fully exploited by learning to generate them in the natural language form. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show the superiority of our proposed method and the capacity of cross-task transfer with the proposed unified Paraphrase modeling framework.

Point-of-Interest (POI) oriented question answering (QA) aims to return a list of POIs given a question issued by a user. Recent advances in intelligent virtual assistants have opened the possibility of engaging the client software more actively in the provision of location-based services, thereby showing great promise for automatic POI retrieval. Some existing QA methods can be adopted on this task such as QA similarity calculation and semantic parsing using pre-defined rules. The returned results, however, are subject to inherent limitations due to the lack of the ability for handling some important POI related information, including tags, location entities, and proximity-related terms (e.g. “nearby”, “close”). In this paper, we present a novel deep learning framework integrated with joint inference to capture both tag semantic and geographic correlation between question and POIs. One characteristic of our model is to propose a special cross attention question embedding neural network structure to obtain question-to-POI and POI-to-question information. Besides, we utilize a skewed distribution to simulate the spatial relationship between questions and POIs. By measuring the results offered by the model against existing methods, we demonstrate its robustness and practicability, and supplement our conclusions with empirical evidence.