Tianhao Shen


2023

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X-RiSAWOZ: High-Quality End-to-End Multilingual Dialogue Datasets and Few-shot Agents
Mehrad Moradshahi | Tianhao Shen | Kalika Bali | Monojit Choudhury | Gael de Chalendar | Anmol Goel | Sungkyun Kim | Prashant Kodali | Ponnurangam Kumaraguru | Nasredine Semmar | Sina Semnani | Jiwon Seo | Vivek Seshadri | Manish Shrivastava | Michael Sun | Aditya Yadavalli | Chaobin You | Deyi Xiong | Monica Lam
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Task-oriented dialogue research has mainly focused on a few popular languages like English and Chinese, due to the high dataset creation cost for a new language. To reduce the cost, we apply manual editing to automatically translated data. We create a new multilingual benchmark, X-RiSAWOZ, by translating the Chinese RiSAWOZ to 4 languages: English, French, Hindi, Korean; and a code-mixed English-Hindi language.X-RiSAWOZ has more than 18,000 human-verified dialogue utterances for each language, and unlike most multilingual prior work, is an end-to-end dataset for building fully-functioning agents. The many difficulties we encountered in creating X-RiSAWOZ led us to develop a toolset to accelerate the post-editing of a new language dataset after translation. This toolset improves machine translation with a hybrid entity alignment technique that combines neural with dictionary-based methods, along with many automated and semi-automated validation checks. We establish strong baselines for X-RiSAWOZ by training dialogue agents in the zero- and few-shot settings where limited gold data is available in the target language. Our results suggest that our translation and post-editing methodology and toolset can be used to create new high-quality multilingual dialogue agents cost-effectively. Our dataset, code, and toolkit are released open-source.

2022

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Recovering Gold from Black Sand: Multilingual Dense Passage Retrieval with Hard and False Negative Samples
Tianhao Shen | Mingtong Liu | Ming Zhou | Deyi Xiong
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Negative samples have not been efficiently explored in multilingual dense passage retrieval. In this paper, we propose a novel multilingual dense passage retrieval framework, mHFN, to recover and utilize hard and false negative samples. mHFN consists of three key components: 1) a multilingual hard negative sample augmentation module that allows knowledge of indistinguishable passages to be shared across multiple languages and synthesizes new hard negative samples by interpolating representations of queries and existing hard negative samples, 2) a multilingual negative sample cache queue that stores negative samples from previous batches in each language to increase the number of multilingual negative samples used in training beyond the batch size limit, and 3) a lightweight adaptive false negative sample filter that uses generated pseudo labels to separate unlabeled false negative samples and converts them into positive passages in training. We evaluate mHFN on Mr. TyDi, a high-quality multilingual dense passage retrieval dataset covering eleven typologically diverse languages, and experimental results show that mHFN outperforms strong sparse, dense and hybrid baselines and achieves new state-of-the-art performance on all languages. Our source code is available at https://github.com/Magnetic2014/mHFN.