In this paper, we propose a novel method, retrieval, masking, and generation, for feedback comment generation. Feedback comment generation is a task in which a system generates feedback comments such as hints or explanatory notes for language learners, given input text and position showing where to comment. In the conventional study, the retrieve-and-edit method for retrieving feedback comments in the data pool and editing the comments has been thought effective for this task. However, the performance of this method does not perform as well as other conventional methods because its model learns to edit tokens that do not need to be rewritten in the retrieved comments. To mitigate this problem, we propose a method for combining retrieval, masking, and generation based on the retrieve-and-edit method. Specifically, tokens of feedback comments retrieved from the data pool are masked, and this masked feedback comment is used as a template to generate feedback comments. The proposed method should prevent unnecessary conversion by using not retrieved feedback comments directly but masking them. Our experiments on feedback comment generation demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms conventional methods.

This paper presents a novel multi-perspective document revision task. In conventional studies on document revision, tasks such as grammatical error correction, sentence reordering, and discourse relation classification have been performed individually; however, these tasks simultaneously should be revised to improve the readability and clarity of a whole document. Thus, our study defines multi-perspective document revision as a task that simultaneously revises multiple perspectives. To model the task, we design a novel Japanese multi-perspective document revision dataset that simultaneously handles seven perspectives to improve the readability and clarity of a document. Although a large amount of data that simultaneously handles multiple perspectives is needed to model multi-perspective document revision elaborately, it is difficult to prepare such a large amount of this data. Therefore, our study offers a multi-perspective document revision modeling method that can use a limited amount of matched data (i.e., data for the multi-perspective document revision task) and external partially-matched data (e.g., data for the grammatical error correction task). Experiments using our created dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of using multiple partially-matched datasets to model the multi-perspective document revision task.

This paper presents a novel fusion method for integrating an external language model (LM) into the Transformer based sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) model. While paired data are basically required to train the seq2seq model, the external LM can be trained with only unpaired data. Thus, it is important to leverage memorized knowledge in the external LM for building the seq2seq model, since it is hard to prepare a large amount of paired data. However, the existing fusion methods assume that the LM is integrated with recurrent neural network-based seq2seq models instead of the Transformer. Therefore, this paper proposes a fusion method that can explicitly utilize network structures in the Transformer. The proposed method, called memory attentive fusion, leverages the Transformer-style attention mechanism that repeats source-target attention in a multi-hop manner for reading the memorized knowledge in the LM. Our experiments on two text-style conversion tasks demonstrate that the proposed method performs better than conventional fusion methods.

This paper is an initial study on multi-task and multi-lingual joint learning for lexical utterance classification. A major problem in constructing lexical utterance classification modules for spoken dialogue systems is that individual data resources are often limited or unbalanced among tasks and/or languages. Various studies have examined joint learning using neural-network based shared modeling; however, previous joint learning studies focused on either cross-task or cross-lingual knowledge transfer. In order to simultaneously support both multi-task and multi-lingual joint learning, our idea is to explicitly divide state-of-the-art neural lexical utterance classification into language-specific components that can be shared between different tasks and task-specific components that can be shared between different languages. In addition, in order to effectively transfer knowledge between different task data sets and different language data sets, this paper proposes a partially-shared modeling method that possesses both shared components and components specific to individual data sets. We demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed method using Japanese and English data sets with three different lexical utterance classification tasks.

This paper proposes a fully neural network based dialogue-context online end-of-turn detection method that can utilize long-range interactive information extracted from both speaker’s utterances and collocutor’s utterances. The proposed method combines multiple time-asynchronous long short-term memory recurrent neural networks, which can capture speaker’s and collocutor’s multiple sequential features, and their interactions. On the assumption of applying the proposed method to spoken dialogue systems, we introduce speaker’s acoustic sequential features and collocutor’s linguistic sequential features, each of which can be extracted in an online manner. Our evaluation confirms the effectiveness of taking dialogue context formed by the speaker’s utterances and collocutor’s utterances into consideration.