Referring Expression Generation (REG) is the task of generating a description that unambiguously identifies a given target in the scene. Different from Image Captioning (IC), REG requires learning fine-grained characteristics of not only the scene objects but also their surrounding context. Referring expressions are usually not singular; an object can often be uniquely referenced in numerous ways, for instance, by color, by location, or by relationship with other objects. Most prior works, however, have not explored this ‘aspect-based multiplicity’ of referring expressions. Hence, in this work, we focus on the Aspect-Controlled REG task, which requires generating a referring expression conditioned on the input aspect(s), where an aspect captures a style of reference. By changing the input aspect such as color, location, action etc., one can generate multiple distinct expressions per target region. To solve this new task, we first modify BLIP for aligning image-regions and text-expressions. We achieve this through a novel approach for feeding the input by drawing a bounding box around the target image-region and prompting the model to generate the referring expression. Our base REG model already beats all prior works in CIDEr score. To tackle Aspect-Controlled REG, we append ‘aspect tokens’ to the prompt and show that distinct expressions can be generated by just changing the prompt. Finally, to prove the high-quality and diversity of the data generated by our proposed aspect-controlled REG model, we also perform data-augmentation-based evaluation on the downstream Referring Expression Comprehension (REC) task. With just half of the real data augmented with the generated synthetic data, we achieve performance comparable to training with 100% of real data, using a SOTA REC model.

Models of various NLP tasks have been shown to exhibit stereotypes, and the bias in the question answering (QA) models is especially harmful as the output answers might be directly consumed by the end users. There have been datasets to evaluate bias in QA models, while bias mitigation technique for the QA models is still under-explored. In this work, we propose BMBI, an approach to mitigate the bias of multiple-choice QA models. Based on the intuition that a model would lean to be more biased if it learns from a biased example, we measure the bias level of a query instance by observing its influence on another instance. If the influenced instance is more biased, we derive that the query instance is biased. We then use the bias level detected as an optimization objective to form a multi-task learning setting in addition to the original QA task. We further introduce a new bias evaluation metric to quantify bias in a comprehensive and sensitive way. We show that our method could be applied to multiple QA formulations across multiple bias categories. It can significantly reduce the bias level in all 9 bias categories in the BBQ dataset while maintaining comparable QA accuracy.

Recent advances in prompt tuning have proven effective as a new language modeling paradigm for various natural language understanding tasks. However, it is challenging to adapt the soft prompt embeddings to different domains or generalize to low-data settings when learning soft prompts itself is unstable, task-specific, and bias-prone. This paper proposes a principled learning framework—soft prompt construction (SPC)—to facilitate learning domain-adaptable soft prompts. Derived from the SPC framework is a simple loss that can plug into various models and tuning approaches to improve their cross-domain performance. We show SPC can improve upon SOTA for contextual query rewriting, summarization, and paraphrase detection by up to 5%, 19%, and 16%, respectively.

Automatic melody-to-lyric generation is a task in which song lyrics are generated to go with a given melody. It is of significant practical interest and more challenging than unconstrained lyric generation as the music imposes additional constraints onto the lyrics. The training data is limited as most songs are copyrighted, resulting in models that underfit the complicated cross-modal relationship between melody and lyrics. In this work, we propose a method for generating high-quality lyrics without training on any aligned melody-lyric data. Specifically, we design a hierarchical lyric generation framework that first generates a song outline and second the complete lyrics. The framework enables disentanglement of training (based purely on text) from inference (melody-guided text generation) to circumvent the shortage of parallel data. We leverage the segmentation and rhythm alignment between melody and lyrics to compile the given melody into decoding constraints as guidance during inference. The two-step hierarchical design also enables content control via the lyric outline, a much-desired feature for democratizing collaborative song creation. Experimental results show that our model can generate high-quality lyrics that are more on-topic, singable, intelligible, and coherent than strong baselines, for example SongMASS, a SOTA model trained on a parallel dataset, with a 24% relative overall quality improvement based on human ratings. Our code is available at https://github.com/amazon-science/unsupervised-melody-to-lyrics-generation.

Learning from multimodal data has become a popular research topic in recent years. Multimodal coreference resolution (MCR) is an important task in this area. MCR involves resolving the references across different modalities, e.g., text and images, which is a crucial capability for building next-generation conversational agents. MCR is challenging as it requires encoding information from different modalities and modeling associations between them. Although significant progress has been made for visual-linguistic tasks such as visual grounding, most of the current works involve single turn utterances and focus on simple coreference resolutions. In this work, we propose an MCR model that resolves coreferences made in multi-turn dialogues with scene images. We present GRAVL-BERT, a unified MCR framework which combines visual relationships between objects, background scenes, dialogue, and metadata by integrating Graph Neural Networks with VL-BERT. We present results on the SIMMC 2.0 multimodal conversational dataset, achieving the rank-1 on the DSTC-10 SIMMC 2.0 MCR challenge with F1 score 0.783. Our code is available at https://github.com/alexa/gravl-bert.

The tasks of humor understanding and generation are challenging and subjective even for humans, requiring commonsense and real-world knowledge to master. Puns, in particular, add the challenge of fusing that knowledge with the ability to interpret lexical-semantic ambiguity. In this paper, we present the ExPUNations (ExPUN) dataset, in which we augment an existing dataset of puns with detailed crowdsourced annotations of keywords denoting the most distinctive words that make the text funny, pun explanations describing why the text is funny, and fine-grained funniness ratings. This is the first humor dataset with such extensive and fine-grained annotations specifically for puns. Based on these annotations, we propose two tasks: explanation generation to aid with pun classification and keyword-conditioned pun generation, to challenge the current state-of-the-art natural language understanding and generation models’ ability to understand and generate humor. We showcase that the annotated keywords we collect are helpful for generating better novel humorous texts in human evaluation, and that our natural language explanations can be leveraged to improve both the accuracy and robustness of humor classifiers.

Previous work on pun generation commonly begins with a given pun word (a pair of homophones for heterographic pun generation and a polyseme for homographic pun generation) and seeks to generate an appropriate pun. While this may enable efficient pun generation, we believe that a pun is most entertaining if it fits appropriately within a given context, e.g., a given situation or dialogue. In this work, we propose a new task, context-situated pun generation, where a specific context represented by a set of keywords is provided, and the task is to first identify suitable pun words that are appropriate for the context, then generate puns based on the context keywords and the identified pun words. We collect a new dataset, CUP (Context-sitUated Pun), containing 4.5k tuples of context words and pun pairs. Based on the new data and setup, we propose a pipeline system for context-situated pun generation, including a pun word retrieval module that identifies suitable pun words for a given context, and a pun generation module that generates puns from context keywords and pun words. Human evaluation shows that 69% of our top retrieved pun words can be used to generate context-situated puns, and our generation module yields successful puns 31% of the time given a plausible tuple of context words and pun pair, almost tripling the yield of a state-of-the-art pun generation model. With an end-to-end evaluation, our pipeline system with the top-1 retrieved pun pair for a given context can generate successful puns 40% of the time, better than all other modeling variations but 32% lower than the human success rate. This highlights the difficulty of the task, and encourages more research in this direction.

Dialogue State Tracking (DST) forms a core component of automated chatbot based systems designed for specific goals like hotel, taxi reservation, tourist information etc. With the increasing need to deploy such systems in new domains, solving the problem of zero/few-shot DST has become necessary. There has been a rising trend for learning to transfer knowledge from resource-rich domains to unknown domains with minimal need for additional data. In this work, we explore the merits of meta-learning algorithms for this transfer and hence, propose a meta-learner D-REPTILE specific to the DST problem. With extensive experimentation, we provide clear evidence of benefits over conventional approaches across different domains, methods, base models and datasets with significant (5-25%) improvement over the baseline in a low-data setting. Our proposed meta-learner is agnostic of the underlying model and hence any existing state-of-the-art DST system can improve its performance on unknown domains using our training strategy.

Natural Language Generation (NLG) for task-oriented dialogue systems focuses on communicating specific content accurately, fluently, and coherently. While these attributes are crucial for a successful dialogue, it is also desirable to simultaneously accomplish specific stylistic goals, such as response length, point-of-view, descriptiveness, sentiment, formality, and empathy. In this work, we focus on stylistic control and evaluation for schema-guided NLG, with joint goals of achieving both semantic and stylistic control. We experiment in detail with various controlled generation methods for large pretrained language models: specifically, conditional training, guided fine-tuning, and guided decoding. We discuss their advantages and limitations, and evaluate them with a broad range of automatic and human evaluation metrics. Our results show that while high style accuracy and semantic correctness are easier to achieve for more lexically-defined styles with conditional training, stylistic control is also achievable for more semantically complex styles using discriminator-based guided decoding methods. The results also suggest that methods that are more scalable (with less hyper-parameters tuning) and that disentangle context generation and stylistic variations are more effective at achieving semantic correctness and style accuracy.

Traditional goal-oriented dialogue systems rely on various components such as natural language understanding, dialogue state tracking, policy learning and response generation. Training each component requires annotations which are hard to obtain for every new domain, limiting scalability of such systems. Similarly, rule-based dialogue systems require extensive writing and maintenance of rules and do not scale either. End-to-End dialogue systems, on the other hand, do not require module-specific annotations but need a large amount of data for training. To overcome these problems, in this demo, we present Alexa Conversations, a new approach for building goal-oriented dialogue systems that is scalable, extensible as well as data efficient. The components of this system are trained in a data-driven manner, but instead of collecting annotated conversations for training, we generate them using a novel dialogue simulator based on a few seed dialogues and specifications of APIs and entities provided by the developer. Our approach provides out-of-the-box support for natural conversational phenomenon like entity sharing across turns or users changing their mind during conversation without requiring developers to provide any such dialogue flows. We exemplify our approach using a simple pizza ordering task and showcase its value in reducing the developer burden for creating a robust experience. Finally, we evaluate our system using a typical movie ticket booking task integrated with live APIs and show that the dialogue simulator is an essential component of the system that leads to over 50% improvement in turn-level action signature prediction accuracy.

Dialogue state tracking (DST) is at the heart of task-oriented dialogue systems. However, the scarcity of labeled data is an obstacle to building accurate and robust state tracking systems that work across a variety of domains. Existing approaches generally require some dialogue data with state information and their ability to generalize to unknown domains is limited. In this paper, we propose using machine reading comprehension (RC) in state tracking from two perspectives: model architectures and datasets. We divide the slot types in dialogue state into categorical or extractive to borrow the advantages from both multiple-choice and span-based reading comprehension models. Our method achieves near the current state-of-the-art in joint goal accuracy on MultiWOZ 2.1 given full training data. More importantly, by leveraging machine reading comprehension datasets, our method outperforms the existing approaches by many a large margin in few-shot scenarios when the availability of in-domain data is limited. Lastly, even without any state tracking data, i.e., zero-shot scenario, our proposed approach achieves greater than 90% average slot accuracy in 12 out of 30 slots in MultiWOZ 2.1.

Neural network based approaches to data-to-text natural language generation (NLG) have gained popularity in recent years, with the goal of generating a natural language prompt that accurately realizes an input meaning representation. To facilitate the training of neural network models, researchers created large datasets of paired utterances and their meaning representations. However, the creation of such datasets is an arduous task and they mostly consist of simple meaning representations composed of slot and value tokens to be realized. These representations do not include any contextual information that an NLG system can use when trying to generalize, such as domain information and descriptions of slots and values. In this paper, we present the novel task of Schema-Guided Natural Language Generation (SG-NLG). Here, the goal is still to generate a natural language prompt, but in SG-NLG, the input MRs are paired with rich schemata providing contextual information. To generate a dataset for SG-NLG we re-purpose an existing dataset for another task: dialog state tracking, which includes a large and rich schema spanning multiple different attributes, including information about the domain, user intent, and slot descriptions. We train different state-of-the-art models for neural natural language generation on this dataset and show that in many cases, including rich schema information allows our models to produce higher quality outputs both in terms of semantics and diversity. We also conduct experiments comparing model performance on seen versus unseen domains, and present a human evaluation demonstrating high ratings for overall output quality.

Dialog state tracking is used to estimate the current belief state of a dialog given all the preceding conversation. Machine reading comprehension, on the other hand, focuses on building systems that read passages of text and answer questions that require some understanding of passages. We formulate dialog state tracking as a reading comprehension task to answer the question what is the state of the current dialog? after reading conversational context. In contrast to traditional state tracking methods where the dialog state is often predicted as a distribution over a closed set of all the possible slot values within an ontology, our method uses a simple attention-based neural network to point to the slot values within the conversation. Experiments on MultiWOZ-2.0 cross-domain dialog dataset show that our simple system can obtain similar accuracies compared to the previous more complex methods. By exploiting recent advances in contextual word embeddings, adding a model that explicitly tracks whether a slot value should be carried over to the next turn, and combining our method with a traditional joint state tracking method that relies on closed set vocabulary, we can obtain a joint-goal accuracy of 47.33% on the standard test split, exceeding current state-of-the-art by 11.75%**.

Encoder-decoder based neural architectures serve as the basis of state-of-the-art approaches in end-to-end open domain dialog systems. Since most of such systems are trained with a maximum likelihood (MLE) objective they suffer from issues such as lack of generalizability and the generic response problem, i.e., a system response that can be an answer to a large number of user utterances, e.g., “Maybe, I don’t know.” Having explicit feedback on the relevance and interestingness of a system response at each turn can be a useful signal for mitigating such issues and improving system quality by selecting responses from different approaches. Towards this goal, we present a system that evaluates chatbot responses at each dialog turn for coherence and engagement. Our system provides explicit turn-level dialog quality feedback, which we show to be highly correlated with human evaluation. To show that incorporating this feedback in the neural response generation models improves dialog quality, we present two different and complementary mechanisms to incorporate explicit feedback into a neural response generation model: reranking and direct modification of the loss function during training. Our studies show that a response generation model that incorporates these combined feedback mechanisms produce more engaging and coherent responses in an open-domain spoken dialog setting, significantly improving the response quality using both automatic and human evaluation.

Knowledge graph based simple question answering (KBSQA) is a major area of research within question answering. Although only dealing with simple questions, i.e., questions that can be answered through a single knowledge base (KB) fact, this task is neither simple nor close to being solved. Targeting on the two main steps, subgraph selection and fact selection, the literature has developed sophisticated approaches. However, the importance of subgraph ranking and leveraging the subject–relation dependency of a KB fact have not been sufficiently explored. Motivated by this, we present a unified framework to describe and analyze existing approaches. Using this framework as a starting point we focus on two aspects: improving subgraph selection through a novel ranking method, and leveraging the subject–relation dependency by proposing a joint scoring CNN model with a novel loss function that enforces the well-order of scores. Our methods achieve a new state of the art (85.44% in accuracy) on the SimpleQuestions dataset.

Executable semantic parsing is the task of converting natural language utterances into logical forms that can be directly used as queries to get a response. We build a transfer learning framework for executable semantic parsing. We show that the framework is effective for Question Answering (Q&A) as well as for Spoken Language Understanding (SLU). We further investigate the case where a parser on a new domain can be learned by exploiting data on other domains, either via multi-task learning between the target domain and an auxiliary domain or via pre-training on the auxiliary domain and fine-tuning on the target domain. With either flavor of transfer learning, we are able to improve performance on most domains; we experiment with public data sets such as Overnight and NLmaps as well as with commercial SLU data. The experiments carried out on data sets that are different in nature show how executable semantic parsing can unify different areas of NLP such as Q&A and SLU.

This paper introduces a meaning representation for spoken language understanding. The Alexa meaning representation language (AMRL), unlike previous approaches, which factor spoken utterances into domains, provides a common representation for how people communicate in spoken language. AMRL is a rooted graph, links to a large-scale ontology, supports cross-domain queries, fine-grained types, complex utterances and composition. A spoken language dataset has been collected for Alexa, which contains ∼20k examples across eight domains. A version of this meaning representation was released to developers at a trade show in 2016.

We discuss learning latent annotations for synchronous context-free grammars (SCFG) for the purpose of improving machine translation. We show that learning annotations for nonterminals results in not only more accurate translation, but also faster SCFG decoding.