Crowdsourced labels play a crucial role in evaluating task-oriented dialogue systems (TDSs). Obtaining high-quality and consistent ground-truth labels from annotators presents challenges. When evaluating a TDS, annotators must fully comprehend the dialogue before providing judgments. Previous studies suggest using only a portion of the dialogue context in the annotation process. However, the impact of this limitation on label quality remains unexplored. This study investigates the influence of dialogue context on annotation quality, considering the truncated context for relevance and usefulness labeling. We further propose to use large language models ( LLMs) to summarize the dialogue context to provide a rich and short description of the dialogue context and study the impact of doing so on the annotator’s performance. Reducing context leads to more positive ratings. Conversely, providing the entire dialogue context yields higher-quality relevance ratings but introduces ambiguity in usefulness ratings. Using the first user utterance as context leads to consistent ratings, akin to those obtained using the entire dialogue, with significantly reduced annotation effort. Our findings show how task design, particularly the availability of dialogue context, affects the quality and consistency of crowdsourced evaluation labels.

A dialogue response is malevolent if it is grounded in negative emotions, inappropriate behavior, or an unethical value basis in terms of content and dialogue acts. The detection of malevolent dialogue responses is attracting growing interest. Current research on detecting dialogue malevolence has limitations in terms of datasets and methods. First, available dialogue datasets related to malevolence are labeled with a single category, but in practice assigning a single category to each utterance may not be appropriate as some malevolent utterances belong to multiple labels. Second, current methods for detecting dialogue malevolence neglect label correlation. Therefore, we propose the task of multi-label dialogue malevolence detection and crowdsource a multi-label dataset, multi-label dialogue malevolence detection (MDMD) for evaluation. We also propose a multi-label malevolence detection model, multi-faceted label correlation enhanced CRF (MCRF), with two label correlation mechanisms, label correlation in taxonomy (LCT) and label correlation in context (LCC). Experiments on MDMD show that our method outperforms the best performing baseline by a large margin, i.e., 16.1%, 11.9%, 12.0%, and 6.1% on precision, recall, F1, and Jaccard score, respectively.

A long-term ambition of information seeking QA systems is to reason over multi-modal contexts and generate natural answers to user queries. Today, memory intensive pre-trained language models are adapted to downstream tasks such as QA by fine-tuning the model on QA data in a specific modality like unstructured text or structured tables. To avoid training such memory-hungry models while utilizing a uniform architecture for each modality, parameter-efficient adapters add and train small task-specific bottle-neck layers between transformer layers. In this work, we study parameter-efficient abstractive QA in encoder-decoder models over structured tabular data and unstructured textual data using only 1.5% additional parameters for each modality. We also ablate over adapter layers in both encoder and decoder modules to study the efficiency-performance trade-off and demonstrate that reducing additional trainable parameters down to 0.7%-1.0% leads to comparable results. Our models out-perform current state-of-the-art models on tabular QA datasets such as Tablesum and FeTaQA, and achieve comparable performance on a textual QA dataset such as NarrativeQA using significantly less trainable parameters than fine-tuning.

Automatic text summarization has enjoyed great progress over the years and is used in numerous applications, impacting the lives of many. Despite this development, there is little research that meaningfully investigates how the current research focus in automatic summarization aligns with users’ needs. To bridge this gap, we propose a survey methodology that can be used to investigate the needs of users of automatically generated summaries. Importantly, these needs are dependent on the target group. Hence, we design our survey in such a way that it can be easily adjusted to investigate different user groups. In this work we focus on university students, who make extensive use of summaries during their studies. We find that the current research directions of the automatic summarization community do not fully align with students’ needs. Motivated by our findings, we present ways to mitigate this mismatch in future research on automatic summarization: we propose research directions that impact the design, the development and the evaluation of automatically generated summaries.