Augmenting Large Language Models (LLMs) for Question Answering (QA) with domain specific data has attracted wide attention. However, domain data often exists in a hybrid format, including text and semi-structured tables, posing challenges for the seamless integration of information. Table-to-Text Generation is a promising solution by facilitating the transformation of hybrid data into a uniformly text-formatted corpus. Although this technique has been widely studied by the NLP community, there is currently no comparative analysis on how corpora generated by different table-to-text methods affect the performance of QA systems.In this paper, we address this research gap in two steps. First, we innovatively integrate table-to-text generation into the framework of enhancing LLM-based QA systems with domain hybrid data. Then, we utilize this framework in real-world industrial data to conduct extensive experiments on two types of QA systems (DSFT and RAG frameworks) with four representative methods: Markdown format, Template serialization, TPLM-based method, and LLM-based method. Based on the experimental results, we draw some empirical findings and explore the underlying reasons behind the success of some methods. We hope the findings of this work will provide a valuable reference for the academic and industrial communities in developing robust QA systems.

Dialogue summarization has recently garnered significant attention due to its wide range of applications. However, existing methods for summarizing dialogues have limitations because they do not take into account the inherent structure of dialogue and rely heavily on labeled data, which can lead to poor performance in new domains. In this work, we propose DIONYSUS (dynamic input optimization in pre-training for dialogue summarization), a pre-trained encoder-decoder model for summarizing dialogues in any new domain. To pre-train DIONYSUS, we create two pseudo summaries for each dialogue example: one from a fine-tuned summarization model and the other from important dialogue turns. We then choose one of these pseudo summaries based on information distribution differences in different types of dialogues. This selected pseudo summary serves as the objective for pre-training DIONYSUS using a self-supervised approach on a large dialogue corpus. Our experiments show that DIONYSUS outperforms existing methods on six datasets, as demonstrated by its ROUGE scores in zero-shot and few-shot settings

Recent studies have pointed out that many well-developed Visual Question Answering (VQA) systems suffer from bias problem. Despite the remarkable performance gained on In-Distribution (ID) datasets, the VQA model might merely capture the superficial correlation from question to answer rather than showing real reasoning abilities. Therefore, when switching to Out-of-Distribution (OOD) dataset, whose test distribution is unknown or even reversed with the training set, significant drops might be demonstrated. Although efforts have been devoted to easing the negative bias effect brought by language prior and analysing its inherent cause, they are still limited by the following two aspects. First, most current debiasing methods achieve promising OOD generalization ability with a major sacrifice of the ID performance. Second, existing researches are restricted by exploiting comprehensive biases, since weakening the language bias is mainly focused, while only a few works consider vision bias. In this paper, we investigate a straightforward way to mitigate bias problem for VQA task. Specifically, we reduce bias effect by subtracting bias score from standard VQA base score. Based on such a direct strategy, we design two bias learning branches to detect more bias information, which are combined with a dynamical constraint loss to alleviate the problem of over-correction and insufficient debiasing effect. We evaluate our method on the challenging VQA v2.0 and VQA-CP V2,0 datasets and the proposed method achievessignificant improvement.

Opinion summarization is expected to digest larger review sets and provide summaries from different perspectives. However, most existing solutions are deficient in epitomizing extensive reviews and offering opinion summaries from various angles due to the lack of designs for information selection. To this end, we propose SubSumm, a supervised summarization framework for large-scale multi-perspective opinion summarization. SubSumm consists of a review sampling strategy set and a two-stage training scheme. The sampling strategies take sentiment orientation and contrastive information value into consideration, with which the review subsets from different perspectives and quality levels can be selected. Subsequently, the summarizer is encouraged to learn from the sub-optimal and optimal subsets successively in order to capitalize on the massive input. Experimental results on AmaSum and Rotten Tomatoes datasets demonstrate that SubSumm is adept at generating pros, cons, and verdict summaries from hundreds of input reviews. Furthermore, our in-depth analysis verifies that the advanced selection of review subsets and the two-stage training scheme are vital to boosting the summarization performance.

Dialog systems are often designed or trained to output human-like responses. However, some responses may be impossible for a machine to truthfully say (e.g. “that movie made me cry”). Highly anthropomorphic responses might make users uncomfortable or implicitly deceive them into thinking they are interacting with a human. We collect human ratings on the feasibility of approximately 900 two-turn dialogs sampled from 9 diverse data sources. Ratings are for two hypothetical machine embodiments: a futuristic humanoid robot and a digital assistant. We find that for some data-sources commonly used to train dialog systems, 20-30% of utterances are not viewed as possible for a machine. Rating is marginally affected by machine embodiment. We explore qualitative and quantitative reasons for these ratings. Finally, we build classifiers and explore how modeling configuration might affect output permissibly, and discuss implications for building less falsely anthropomorphic dialog systems.

Text-video retrieval focuses on two aspects: cross-modality interaction and video-language encoding. Currently, the mainstream approach is to train a joint embedding space for multimodal interactions. However, there are structural and semantic differences between text and video, making this approach challenging for fine-grained understanding. In order to solve this, we propose an end-to-end graph-based hierarchical aggregation network for text-video retrieval according to the hierarchy possessed by text and video. We design a token-level weighted network to refine intra-modality representations and construct a graph-based message passing attention network for global-local alignment across modality. We conduct experiments on the public datasets MSR-VTT-9K, MSR-VTT-7K and MSVD, and achieve Recall@1 of 73.0%, 65.6%, and 64.0% , which is 25.7%, 16.5%, and 14.2% better than the current state-of-the-art model.

Knowledge-grounded dialogue systems are challenging to build due to the lack of training data and heterogeneous knowledge sources. Existing systems perform poorly on unseen topics due to limited topics covered in the training data. In addition, it is challenging to generalize to the domains that require different types of knowledge sources. To address the above challenges, we present PLUG, a language model that homogenizes different knowledge sources to a unified knowledge representation for knowledge-grounded dialogue generation tasks. We first retrieve relevant information from heterogeneous knowledge sources (e.g., wiki, dictionary, or knowledge graph); Then the retrieved knowledge is transformed into text and concatenated with dialogue history to feed into the language model for generating responses. PLUG is pre-trained on a large-scale knowledge-grounded dialogue corpus. The empirical evaluation on two benchmarks shows that PLUG generalizes well across different knowledge-grounded dialogue tasks. It achieves comparable performance with state-of-the-art methods in the fully-supervised setting and significantly outperforms other approaches in zero-shot and few-shot settings.

We describe a new freely available Chinese multi-party dialogue dataset for automatic extraction of dialogue-based character relationships. The data has been extracted from the original TV scripts of a Chinese sitcom called “I Love My Home” with complex family-based human daily spoken conversations in Chinese. First, we introduced human annotation scheme for both global Character relationship map and character reference relationship. And then we generated the dialogue-based character relationship triples. The corpus annotates relationships between 140 entities in total. We also carried out a data exploration experiment by deploying a BERT-based model to extract character relationships on the CRECIL corpus and another existing relation extraction corpus (DialogRE (CITATION)).The results demonstrate that extracting character relationships is more challenging in CRECIL than in DialogRE.

A key challenge of Conversational Recommendation Systems (CRS) is to integrate the recommendation function and the dialog generation function smoothly. Previous works employ graph neural networks with external knowledge graphs (KG) to model individual recommendation items and integrate KGs with language models through attention mechanism for response generation. Although previous approaches prove effective, there is still room for improvement. For example, KG-based approaches only rely on entity relations and bag-of-words to recommend items and neglect the information in the conversational context. We propose to improve the usage of dialog context for both recommendation and response generation using an encoding architecture along with the self-attention mechanism of transformers. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective architecture comprising a pre-trained language model (PLM) and an item metadata encoder to integrate the recommendation and the dialog generation better. The proposed item encoder learns to map item metadata to embeddings reflecting the rich information of the item, which can be matched with dialog context. The PLM then consumes the context-aware item embeddings and dialog context to generate high-quality recommendations and responses. Experimental results on the benchmark dataset ReDial show that our model obtains state-of-the-art results on both recommendation and response generation tasks.

In natural language processing (NLP), state-of-the-art (SOTA) semi-supervised learning (SSL) frameworks have shown great performance on deep pre-trained language models such as BERT, and are expected to significantly reduce the demand for manual labeling. However, our empirical studies indicate that these frameworks are not suitable for lightweight models such as TextCNN, LSTM and etc. In this work, we develop a new SSL framework called FLiText, which stands for Faster and Lighter semi-supervised Text classification. FLiText introduces an inspirer network together with the consistency regularization framework, which leverages a generalized regular constraint on the lightweight models for efficient SSL. As a result, FLiText obtains new SOTA performance for lightweight models across multiple SSL benchmarks on text classification. Compared with existing SOTA SSL methods on TextCNN, FLiText improves the accuracy of lightweight model TextCNN from 51.00% to 90.49% on IMDb, 39.8% to 58.06% on Yelp-5, and from 55.3% to 65.08% on Yahoo! Answer. In addition, compared with the fully supervised method on the full dataset, FLiText just uses less than 1% of labeled data to improve the accuracy by 6.59%, 3.94%, and 3.22% on the datasets of IMDb, Yelp-5, and Yahoo! Answer respectively.

Emotional support is a crucial ability for many conversation scenarios, including social interactions, mental health support, and customer service chats. Following reasonable procedures and using various support skills can help to effectively provide support. However, due to the lack of a well-designed task and corpora of effective emotional support conversations, research on building emotional support into dialog systems remains lacking. In this paper, we define the Emotional Support Conversation (ESC) task and propose an ESC Framework, which is grounded on the Helping Skills Theory. We construct an Emotion Support Conversation dataset (ESConv) with rich annotation (especially support strategy) in a help-seeker and supporter mode. To ensure a corpus of high-quality conversations that provide examples of effective emotional support, we take extensive effort to design training tutorials for supporters and several mechanisms for quality control during data collection. Finally, we evaluate state-of-the-art dialog models with respect to the ability to provide emotional support. Our results show the importance of support strategies in providing effective emotional support and the utility of ESConv in training more emotional support systems.

Humans are increasingly interacting with machines through language, sometimes in contexts where the user may not know they are talking to a machine (like over the phone or a text chatbot). We aim to understand how system designers and researchers might allow their systems to confirm its non-human identity. We collect over 2,500 phrasings related to the intent of “Are you a robot?”. This is paired with over 2,500 adversarially selected utterances where only confirming the system is non-human would be insufficient or disfluent. We compare classifiers to recognize the intent and discuss the precision/recall and model complexity tradeoffs. Such classifiers could be integrated into dialog systems to avoid undesired deception. We then explore how both a generative research model (Blender) as well as two deployed systems (Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant) handle this intent, finding that systems often fail to confirm their non-human identity. Finally, we try to understand what a good response to the intent would be, and conduct a user study to compare the important aspects when responding to this intent.

We present LEGOEval, an open-source toolkit that enables researchers to easily evaluate dialogue systems in a few lines of code using the online crowdsource platform, Amazon Mechanical Turk. Compared to existing toolkits, LEGOEval features a flexible task design by providing a Python API that maps to commonly used React.js interface components. Researchers can personalize their evaluation procedures easily with our built-in pages as if playing with LEGO blocks. Thus, LEGOEval provides a fast, consistent method for reproducing human evaluation results. Besides the flexible task design, LEGOEval also offers an easy API to review collected data.

Persuasion dialogue system reflects the machine’s ability to make strategic moves beyond verbal communication, and therefore differentiates itself from task-oriented or open-domain dialogues and has its own unique values. However, the repetition and inconsistency problems still persist in dialogue response generation and could substantially impact user experience and impede the persuasion outcome. Besides, although reinforcement learning (RL) approaches have achieved big success in strategic tasks such as games, it requires a sophisticated user simulator to provide real-time feedback to the dialogue system, which limits the application of RL on persuasion dialogues. To address these issues towards a better persuasion dialogue system, we apply RL to refine a language model baseline without user simulators, and distill sentence-level information about repetition, inconsistency, and task relevance through rewards. Moreover, to better accomplish the persuasion task, the model learns from human demonstration to imitate human persuasion behavior and selects the most persuasive responses. Experiments show that our model outperforms previous state-of-the-art dialogue models on both automatic metrics and human evaluation results on a donation persuasion task, and generates more diverse, consistent and persuasive conversations according to the user feedback. We will make the code and model publicly available.

Existing dialog system models require extensive human annotations and are difficult to generalize to different tasks. The recent success of large pre-trained language models such as BERT and GPT-2 (Devlin et al., 2019; Radford et al., 2019) have suggested the effectiveness of incorporating language priors in down-stream NLP tasks. However, how much pre-trained language models can help dialog response generation is still under exploration. In this paper, we propose a simple, general, and effective framework: Alternating Recurrent Dialog Model (ARDM). ARDM models each speaker separately and takes advantage of the large pre-trained language model. It requires no supervision from human annotations such as belief states or dialog acts to achieve effective conversations. ARDM outperforms or is on par with state-of-the-art methods on two popular task-oriented dialog datasets: CamRest676 and MultiWOZ. Moreover, we can generalize ARDM to more challenging, non-collaborative tasks such as persuasion. In persuasion tasks, ARDM is capable of generating human-like responses to persuade people to donate to a charity.

Linguistically informed analyses of language models (LMs) contribute to the understanding and improvement of such models. Here, we introduce the corpus of Chinese linguistic minimal pairs (CLiMP) to investigate what knowledge Chinese LMs acquire. CLiMP consists of sets of 1000 minimal pairs (MPs) for 16 syntactic contrasts in Chinese, covering 9 major Chinese linguistic phenomena. The MPs are semi-automatically generated, and human agreement with the labels in CLiMP is 95.8%. We evaluate 11 different LMs on CLiMP, covering n-grams, LSTMs, and Chinese BERT. We find that classifier–noun agreement and verb complement selection are the phenomena that models generally perform best at. However, models struggle the most with the ba construction, binding, and filler-gap dependencies. Overall, Chinese BERT achieves an 81.8% average accuracy, while the performances of LSTMs and 5-grams are only moderately above chance level.

Suicide prevention hotline counselors aid individuals during difficult times through millions of calls and chats. A chatbot cannot safely replace a counselor, but we explore whether a chatbot can be developed to help train human counselors. Such a system needs to simulate intimate situations across multiple practice sessions. Open-domain dialogue systems frequently suffer from generic responses that do not characterize personal stories, so we look to infuse conversations with persona information by mimicking prototype conversations. Towards building a “Crisisbot” hotline visitor simulation, we propose a counseling strategy annotation scheme and a multi-task framework that leverages these counselor strategies to retrieve similar examples, generate diverse sub-utterances, and interleave prototype and generated sub-utterances into complex responses. We evaluate this framework with crowdworkers and experienced hotline counselors. The framework considerably increases response diversity and specificity, with limited impact to coherence. Our results also show a considerable discrepancy between crowdworker and counselor judgements, which emphasizes the importance of including target populations in system development and evaluation.

Image paragraph captioning (IPC) aims to generate a fine-grained paragraph to describe the visual content of an image. Significant progress has been made by deep neural networks, in which the attention mechanism plays an essential role. However, conventional attention mechanisms tend to ignore the past alignment information, which often results in problems of repetitive captioning and incomplete captioning. In this paper, we propose an Interactive key-value Memory- augmented Attention model for image Paragraph captioning (IMAP) to keep track of the attention history (salient objects coverage information) along with the update-chain of the decoder state and therefore avoid generating repetitive or incomplete image descriptions. In addition, we employ an adaptive attention mechanism to realize adaptive alignment from image regions to caption words, where an image region can be mapped to an arbitrary number of caption words while a caption word can also attend to an arbitrary number of image regions. Extensive experiments on a benchmark dataset (i.e., Stanford) demonstrate the effectiveness of our IMAP model.

面向知识库的自动问答是自然语言处理的一项重要任务,它旨在对用户提出的自然语言形式问题给出精炼、准确的回复。目前由于缺少数据集、特征不一致等因素,导致难以使用通用的数据和方法实现领域知识库问答。因此,本文将“问题意图”视作不同领域问答可能存在的共同特征,将“问题”与三元组知识库中“关系谓词”的映射过程作为问答核心工作。为了考虑多种层次的语义避免重要信息的损失,本文分别将“基于门控卷积的深层语义”和“基于交互注意力机制的浅层语义”两个方面通过门控感知机制相融合。我们在NLPCC-ICCPOL 2016 KBQA数据集上的实验表明,本文提出的方法与现有的基于CDSSM和BDSSM相比,效能有明显的提升。此外,本文通过构造天文常识知识库,将问题与关系谓词映射模型移植到特定领域,结合Bi-LSTM-CRF模型构建了天文常识自动问答系统。