Enhancing user engagement through personalization in conversational agents has gained significance, especially with the advent of large language models that generate fluent responses. Personalized dialogue generation, however, is multifaceted and varies in its definition – ranging from instilling a persona in the agent to capturing users’ explicit and implicit cues. This paper seeks to systemically survey the recent landscape of personalized dialogue generation, including the datasets employed, methodologies developed, and evaluation metrics applied. Covering 22 datasets, we highlight benchmark datasets and newer ones enriched with additional features. We further analyze 17 seminal works from top conferences between 2021-2023 and identify five distinct types of problems. We also shed light on recent progress by LLMs in personalized dialogue generation. Our evaluation section offers a comprehensive summary of assessment facets and metrics utilized in these works. In conclusion, we discuss prevailing challenges and envision prospect directions for future research in personalized dialogue generation.

Lifelogging has gained more attention due to its wide applications, such as personalized recommendations or memory assistance. The issues of collecting and extracting personal life events have emerged. People often share their life experiences with others through conversations. However, extracting life events from conversations is rarely explored. In this paper, we present Life Event Dialog, a dataset containing fine-grained life event annotations on conversational data. In addition, we initiate a novel Conversational Life Event Extraction task and differentiate the task from the public event extraction or the life event extraction from other sources like microblogs. We explore three information extraction (IE) frameworks to address the Conversational Life Event Extraction task: OpenIE, relation extraction, and event extraction. A comprehensive empirical analysis of the three baselines is established. The results suggest that the current event extraction model still struggles with extracting life events from human daily conversations. Our proposed Life Event Dialog dataset and in-depth analysis of IE frameworks will facilitate future research on life event extraction from conversations.

While multilingual training is now an essential ingredient in machine translation (MT) systems, recent work has demonstrated that it has different effects in different multilingual settings, such as many-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many learning. These training settings expose the encoder and the decoder in a machine translation model with different data distributions. In this paper, we examine how different varieties of multilingual training contribute to learning these two components of the MT model. Specifically, we compare bilingual models with encoders and/or decoders initialized by multilingual training. We show that multilingual training is beneficial to encoders in general, while it only benefits decoders for low-resource languages (LRLs). We further find the important attention heads for each language pair and compare their correlations during inference. Our analysis sheds light on how multilingual translation models work and also enables us to propose methods to improve performance by training with highly related languages. Our many-to-one models for high-resource languages and one-to-many models for LRL outperform the best results reported by Aharoni et al. (2019).

This paper explores how humans conduct conversations with images by investigating an open-domain image conversation dataset, ImageChat. We examined the conversations with images from the perspectives of image relevancy and image information. We found that utterances/conversations are not always related to the given image, and conversation topics diverge within three turns about half of the time. Besides image objects, more comprehensive non-object image information is also indispensable. After inspecting the causes, we suggested that understanding the overall scenario of image and connecting objects based on their high-level attributes might be very helpful to generate more engaging open-domain conversations when an image is presented. We proposed enriching the image information with image caption and object tags based on our analysis. With our proposed image⁺ features, we improved automatic metrics including BLEU and Bert Score, and increased the diversity and image-relevancy of generated responses to the strong baseline. The result verifies that our analysis provides valuable insights and could facilitate future research on open-domain conversations with images.

The deep inside-outside recursive autoencoder (DIORA; Drozdov et al. 2019) is a self-supervised neural model that learns to induce syntactic tree structures for input sentences *without access to labeled training data*. In this paper, we discover that while DIORA exhaustively encodes all possible binary trees of a sentence with a soft dynamic program, its vector averaging approach is locally greedy and cannot recover from errors when computing the highest scoring parse tree in bottom-up chart parsing. To fix this issue, we introduce S-DIORA, an improved variant of DIORA that encodes a single tree rather than a softly-weighted mixture of trees by employing a hard argmax operation and a beam at each cell in the chart. Our experiments show that through *fine-tuning* a pre-trained DIORA with our new algorithm, we improve the state of the art in *unsupervised* constituency parsing on the English WSJ Penn Treebank by 2.2-6% F1, depending on the data used for fine-tuning.

Understanding text often requires identifying meaningful constituent spans such as noun phrases and verb phrases. In this work, we show that we can effectively recover these types of labels using the learned phrase vectors from deep inside-outside recursive autoencoders (DIORA). Specifically, we cluster span representations to induce span labels. Additionally, we improve the model’s labeling accuracy by integrating latent code learning into the training procedure. We evaluate this approach empirically through unsupervised labeled constituency parsing. Our method outperforms ELMo and BERT on two versions of the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) dataset and is competitive to prior work that requires additional human annotations, improving over a previous state-of-the-art system that depends on ground-truth part-of-speech tags by 5 absolute F1 points (19% relative error reduction).

In relation extraction for knowledge-based question answering, searching from one entity to another entity via a single relation is called “one hop”. In related work, an exhaustive search from all one-hop relations, two-hop relations, and so on to the max-hop relations in the knowledge graph is necessary but expensive. Therefore, the number of hops is generally restricted to two or three. In this paper, we propose UHop, an unrestricted-hop framework which relaxes this restriction by use of a transition-based search framework to replace the relation-chain-based search one. We conduct experiments on conventional 1- and 2-hop questions as well as lengthy questions, including datasets such as WebQSP, PathQuestion, and Grid World. Results show that the proposed framework enables the ability to halt, works well with state-of-the-art models, achieves competitive performance without exhaustive searches, and opens the performance gap for long relation paths.

We present MoodSwipe, a soft keyboard that suggests text messages given the user-specified emotions utilizing the real dialog data. The aim of MoodSwipe is to create a convenient user interface to enjoy the technology of emotion classification and text suggestion, and at the same time to collect labeled data automatically for developing more advanced technologies. While users select the MoodSwipe keyboard, they can type as usual but sense the emotion conveyed by their text and receive suggestions for their message as a benefit. In MoodSwipe, the detected emotions serve as the medium for suggested texts, where viewing the latter is the incentive to correcting the former. We conduct several experiments to show the superiority of the emotion classification models trained on the dialog data, and further to verify good emotion cues are important context for text suggestion.