Nowadays, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated their ability to be a powerful knowledge generator of generate-then-read paradigm for open-domain question answering (ODQA). However this new paradigm mainly suffers from the “hallucination” and struggles to handle time-sensitive issue because of its expensive knowledge update costs. On the other hand, retrieve-then-read, as a traditional paradigm, is more limited by the relevance of acquired knowledge to the given question. In order to combine the strengths of both paradigms, and overcome their respective shortcomings, we design a new pipeline called “FlexiQA”, in which we utilize the diverse evaluation capabilities of LLMs to select knowledge effectively and flexibly. First, given a question, we prompt a LLM as a discriminator to identify whether it is time-sensitive. For time-sensitive questions, we follow the retrieve-then-read paradigm to obtain the answer. For the non time-sensitive questions, we further prompt the LLM as an evaluator to select a better document from two perspectives: factuality and relevance. Based on the selected document, we leverage a reader to get the final answer. We conduct extensive experiments on three widely-used ODQA benchmarks, the experimental results fully confirm the effectiveness of our approach.

Recent research trends in computational biology have increasingly focused on integrating text and bio-entity modeling, especially in the context of molecules and proteins. However, previous efforts like BioT5 faced challenges in generalizing across diverse tasks and lacked a nuanced understanding of molecular structures, particularly in their textual representations (e.g., IUPAC). This paper introduces BioT5+, an extension of the BioT5 framework, tailored to enhance biological research and drug discovery. BioT5+ incorporates several novel features: integration of IUPAC names for molecular understanding, inclusion of extensive bio-text and molecule data from sources like bioRxiv and PubChem, the multi-task instruction tuning for generality across tasks, and a numerical tokenization technique for improved processing of numerical data. These enhancements allow BioT5+ to bridge the gap between molecular representations and their textual descriptions, providing a more holistic understanding of biological entities, and largely improving the grounded reasoning of bio-text and bio-sequences. The model is pre-trained and fine-tuned with a large number of experiments, including 3 types of problems (classification, regression, generation), 15 kinds of tasks, and 21 total benchmark datasets, demonstrating the remarkable performance and state-of-the-art results in most cases. BioT5+ stands out for its ability to capture intricate relationships in biological data, thereby contributing significantly to bioinformatics and computational biology. Our code is available at https://github.com/QizhiPei/BioT5.

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on instruction-following corpus is a crucial approach toward the alignment of large language models (LLMs). However, the performance of LLMs on standard knowledge and reasoning benchmarks tends to suffer from deterioration at the latter stage of the SFT process, echoing the phenomenon of alignment tax. Through our pilot study, we put a hypothesis that the data biases are probably one cause behind the phenomenon. To address the issue, we introduce a simple disperse-then-merge framework. To be concrete, we disperse the instruction-following data into portions and then train multiple sub-models using different data portions. Lastly, we merge multiple models into a single one via model merging techniques. Despite its simplicity, our framework outperforms various sophisticated methods such as data curation and training regularization on a series of standard knowledge and reasoning benchmarks.

In this paper, by treating in-context learning (ICL) as a meta-optimization process, we explain why LLMs are sensitive to the order of ICL examples. This understanding leads us to the development of Batch-ICL, an effective, efficient, and order-agnostic inference algorithm for ICL. Differing from the standard N-shot learning approach, Batch-ICL employs N separate 1-shot forward computations and aggregates the resulting meta-gradients. These aggregated meta-gradients are then applied to the forward computation of a zero-shot query to generate the final prediction. This batch processing approach renders the LLM agnostic to the order of ICL examples. Through extensive experiments and analysis, we demonstrate that Batch-ICL consistently outperforms most permutations of ICL examples. In some cases, it even exceeds the performance of the best order for standard ICL, all while reducing the computational resources required. Furthermore, we develop a novel variant of Batch-ICL featuring multiple “epochs” of meta-optimization. This variant implicitly explores permutations of ICL examples, further enhancing ICL performance.

Speculative decoding has emerged as a promising technique to accelerate the inference of Large Language Models (LLMs) by employing a small language model to draft a hypothesis sequence, which is then validated by the LLM. The effectiveness of this approach heavily relies on the balance between performance and efficiency of the draft model. In our research, we focus on enhancing the proportion of draft tokens that are accepted to the final output by generating multiple hypotheses instead of just one. This allows the LLM more options to choose from and select the longest sequence that meets its standards. Our analysis reveals that hypotheses produced by the draft model share many common token sequences, suggesting a potential for optimizing computation. Leveraging this observation, we introduce an innovative approach utilizing a directed acyclic graph (DAG) to manage the drafted hypotheses. This structure enables us to efficiently predict and merge recurring token sequences, vastly reducing the computational demands of the draft model. We term this approach Graph-structured Speculative Decoding (GSD). We apply GSD across a range of LLMs, including a 70-billion parameter LLaMA-2 model, and observe a remarkable speedup of 1.70× to 1.94 ×, significantly surpassing standard speculative decoding.

Language models trained on large-scale corpus often generate harmful responses that are harmful and contrary to human values. A prevalent approach for human alignment is reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), utilizing algorithms such as proximal policy optimization (PPO). However, these methods are often characterized by complexity, instability, and substantial resource consumption. Considering that existing large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are already relatively well-aligned and cost-friendly, researchers propose to align the language model with human preferences from AI feedback. Nevertheless, the common practices, that unidirectionally distill the responses, are constrained by the inherent capability of LLMs. To address it, we introduce CycleAlign, a framework that distills alignment capabilities from the parameter-invisible LLMs (black-box) to the parameter-visible models (white-box) in an iterative manner. CycleAlign iteratively improves both the white-box and black-box models by integrating static and dynamic in-context learning and a belief alignment method.Empirical results illustrate that the model fine-tuned by CycleAlign remarkably exceeds existing methods, and achieves the state-of-the-art performance in alignment with human value.

In this paper, we introduce SCALE, a collaborative framework that connects a compact Specialized Translation Model (STM) and a general-purpose Large Language Model (LLM) as one unified translation engine. By introducing translation from STM into the triplet in-context demonstrations, SCALE unlocks refinement and pivoting ability of LLM, thus 1) mitigating language bias of LLMs and parallel data bias of STMs, 2) enhancing LLM speciality without sacrificing generality, and 3) facilitating continual learning in a LLM-tuning-free way.Our comprehensive experiments show that SCALE significantly outperforms both LLMs (GPT-4, GPT-3.5) and supervised models (NLLB, M2M) in either high-resource or challenging low-resource settings. Moreover SCALE shows great scalability by only updating the lightweight STM and witness consistent system improvement, an averaged 4 BLEURT score across 4 languages without tuning LLM. Interestingly, SCALE could also effectively exploit the existing language bias of LLMs by using an English-centric STM as a pivot to conduct translation between any language pairs, outperforming GPT-4 by an average of 6 COMET points across eight translation directions. Furthermore we provide an in-depth analysis of SCALE’s robustness, translation characteristics, latency costs and inherent language bias, providing solid foundation for future studies exploring the potential synergy between LLMs and more specialized models.

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable In-Context Learning (ICL) ability, where the model learns tasks from prompts consisting of input-output examples. However, the pre-training objectives of LLMs often misalign with ICL objectives. They’re mainly pre-trained with methods like masked language modeling and next-sentence prediction. On the other hand, ICL leverages example pairs to guide the model in generating task-aware responses such as text classification and question-answering tasks. The basic pre-training task-related capabilities can sometimes overshadow or conflict with task-specific subtleties required in ICL. To address this, we propose an In-context learning Ability Decoupler (IAD). The model aims to separate the ICL ability from the general ability of LLMs in the meta-training phase, where the ICL-related parameters are separately tuned to adapt for ICL tasks. Concretely, we first identify the parameters that are suitable for ICL by transference-driven gradient importance. We then propose a new max-margin loss to emphasize the separation of the general and ICL abilities. The loss is defined as the difference between the output of ICL and the original LLM, aiming to prevent the overconfidence of the LLM. By meta-training these ICL-related parameters with max-margin loss, we enable the model to learn and adapt to new tasks with limited data effectively. Experimental results show that IAD’s capability yields state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets by utilizing only 30% of the model’s parameters. Ablation study and detailed analysis prove the separation of the two abilities.

Retrieval-based dialogue agents aim at selecting a proper response according to multi-turn conversational history. Existing methods have achieved great progress in terms of retrieval accuracy on benchmarks with pre-trained language models. However, these methods simply concatenate all turns in the dialogue history as the input, ignoring the dialogue dependency and structural information between the utterances. Besides, they usually reason the relationship of the context-response pair at a single level of abstraction (e.g., utterance level), which can not comprehensively capture the fine-grained relation between the context and response. In this paper, we present the multi-grained conversational graph network (MCGN) that considers multiple levels of abstraction from dialogue histories and semantic dependencies within multi-turn dialogues for addressing. Evaluation results on two benchmarks indicate that the proposed multi-grained conversational graph network is helpful for dialogue context understanding and can bring consistent and significant improvement over the state-of-the-art methods.

The emergence of pre-trained models marks a significant juncture for the multilingual generation, offering unprecedented capabilities to comprehend and produce text across multiple languages. These models display commendable efficiency in high-resource languages. However, their performance notably falters in low-resource languages due to the extensive linguistic diversity encountered. Moreover, the existing works lack thorough analysis impairs the discovery of effective multilingual strategies, further complicating the advancement of current multilingual generation systems. This paper aims to appraise the efficacy of multilingual generation tasks, with a focus on summarization, through three resource availability scenarios: high-resource, low-resource, and zero-shot. We classify multilingual generation methodologies into three foundational categories based on their underlying modeling principles: Fine-tuning, Parameter-isolation, and Constraint-based approaches. Following this classification, we conduct a comprehensive comparative study of these methodologies across different resource contexts using two datasets that span six languages. This analysis provides insights into the unique advantages and limitations of each method. In addition, we introduce an innovative yet simple automatic metric LANGM designed to mitigate the prevalent problem of spurious correlations associated with language mixing. LANGM accurately measures the degree of code-mixing at the language level. Finally, we highlight several challenges and suggest potential avenues for future inquiry, aiming to spur further advancements within the field of multilingual text generation.

In reasoning tasks, even a minor error can cascade into inaccurate results, leading to suboptimal performance of large language models insuch domains. Earlier fine-tuning approaches sought to mitigate this by leveraging more precise supervisory signals from human labeling, larger models, or self-sampling, although at a high cost. Conversely, we develop a method that avoids external resources, relying instead on introducing perturbations to the input. Our training approach randomly masks certain tokens within the chain of thought, a techniquewe found to be particularly effective for reasoning tasks. When applied to fine-tuning with GSM8K on Llama-2-7B, this method achieveda 5% improvement in GSM8K accuracy and a 10% improvement in GSM-IC accuracy over standard supervised fine-tuning with a few codes modified. Furthermore, it is complementary to existing methods. When integrated with related explicit data augmentation methods, it leads to improvements across five datasets of various augmentation methods, as well as two different base models. We further investigate the mechanisms behind this improvement through case studies and quantitative analysis, suggesting that our approach may provide superior support for the model in capturing long-distance dependencies, especially those related to questions. This enhancement could deepen understanding of the premises in questions and prior steps.

With the remarkable advancements of large language models (LLMs), LLM-based agents have become a research hotspot in human-computer interaction.However, there is a scarcity of benchmarks available for LLM-based mobile agents.Benchmarking these agents generally faces three main challenges:(1) The inefficiency of UI-only operations imposes limitations to task evaluation.(2) Specific instructions within a singular application lack adequacy for assessing the multi-dimensional reasoning and decision-making capacities of LLM mobile agents.(3) Current evaluation metrics are insufficient to accurately assess the process of sequential actions. To this end, we propose Mobile-Bench, a novel benchmark for evaluating the capabilities of LLM-based mobile agents.First, we expand conventional UI operations by incorporating 103 collected APIs to accelerate the efficiency of task completion.Subsequently, we collect evaluation data by combining real user queries with augmentation from LLMs.To better evaluate different levels of planning capabilities for mobile agents, our data is categorized into three distinct groups: SAST, SAMT, and MAMT, reflecting varying levels of task complexity. Mobile-Bench comprises 832 data entries, with more than 200 tasks specifically designed to evaluate multi-APP collaboration scenarios.Furthermore, we introduce a more accurate evaluation metric, named CheckPoint, to assess whether LLM-based mobile agents reach essential points during their planning and reasoning steps. Dataset and platform will be released in the future.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the landscape of reasoning tasks. To enhance the capabilities of LLMs to emulate human reasoning, prior studies have focused on modeling reasoning steps using various thought structures like chains, trees, or graphs. However, LLM-based reasoning still encounters the following challenges: (1) Limited adaptability of preset structures to diverse tasks; (2) Insufficient precision in exploiting known conditions to derive new ones; and (3) Inadequate consideration of historical reasoning experiences for subsequent reasoning steps. To this end, we propose DetermLR, a novel perspective that rethinks the reasoning process as an evolution from indeterminacy to determinacy. First, we categorize known conditions into two types: determinate and indeterminate premises, facilitating the transformation process. Subsequently, we leverage quantitative measurements to prioritize more relevant premises to explore new insights. Furthermore, we automate the storage and extraction of available premises and reasoning paths with reasoning memory, preserving historical reasoning details for subsequent reasoning steps. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that DetermLR surpasses all baselines on various logical reasoning benchmarks: LogiQA, ProofWriter, FOLIO, PrOntoQA, and LogicalDeduction. Compared to previous multi-step reasoning methods, DetermLR achieves higher accuracy with fewer reasoning steps, highlighting its superior efficiency and effectiveness in solving logical reasoning tasks.

In this paper, we demonstrate that an inherent waveform pattern in the attention allocation of large language models (LLMs) significantly affects their performance in tasks demanding a high degree of context awareness, such as utilizing LLMs for tool-use. Specifically, the crucial information in the context will be potentially overlooked by model when it is positioned in the trough zone of the attention waveform, leading to decreased performance. To address this issue, we propose a novel inference method named Attention Buckets. It allows LLMs to process their input through multiple parallel processes. Each process utilizes a distinct base angle for the rotary position embedding, thereby creating a unique attention waveform. By compensating an attention trough of a particular process with an attention peak of another process, our approach enhances LLM’s awareness to various contextual positions, thus mitigating the risk of overlooking crucial information. In the largest tool-use benchmark, our method elevates a 7B model to achieve state-of-the-art performance, comparable to that of GPT-4. On other benchmarks and some RAG tasks, which also demand a thorough understanding of contextual content, Attention Buckets also exhibited notable enhancements in performance.

Recently, the advent of large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized generative agents. Among them, Role-Playing Conversational Agents (RPCAs) attract considerable attention due to their ability to emotionally engage users. However, the absence of a comprehensive benchmark impedes progress in this field. To bridge this gap, we introduce CharacterEval, a Chinese benchmark for comprehensive RPCA assessment, complemented by a tailored high-quality dataset. The dataset comprises 1,785 multi-turn role-playing dialogues, encompassing 11,376 examples and featuring 77 characters derived from Chinese novels and scripts. It was carefully constructed, beginning with initial dialogue extraction via GPT-4, followed by rigorous human-led quality control, and enhanced with in-depth character profiles sourced from Baidu Baike. CharacterEval employs a multifaceted evaluation approach, encompassing thirteen targeted metrics on four dimensions. To facilitate the convenient evaluation for these subjective metrics in CharacterEval, we further developed CharacterRM, a role-playing reward model based on human annotations, which has a higher correlation with human judgment compared to GPT-4. Comprehensive experiments on CharacterEval demonstrate that Chinese LLMs exhibit more promising capabilities than GPT-4 in Chinese role-playing conversation.

This paper presents our enhanced BioT5+ method for the Language + Molecules shared task at the ACL 2024 Workshop. The task involves “translating” between molecules and natural language, including molecule captioning and text-based molecule generation using the L+M-24 dataset. Our method consists of three stages. In the first stage, we distill data from various models. In the second stage, combined with extra version of the provided dataset, we train diverse models for subsequent voting ensemble.We also adopt Transductive Ensemble Learning (TEL) to enhance these base models. Lastly, all models are integrated using a voting ensemble method. Experimental results demonstrate that BioT5+ achieves superior performance on L+M-24 dataset. On the final leaderboard, our method (team name: qizhipei) ranks first in the text-based molecule generation task and second in the molecule captioning task, highlighting its efficacy and robustness in translating between molecules and natural language. The pre-trained BioT5+ models are available at https://github.com/QizhiPei/BioT5.

In open-domain dialogue generation tasks, contexts and responses in most datasets are one-to-one mapped, violating an important many-to-many characteristic: a context leads to various responses, and a response answers multiple contexts. Without such patterns, models poorly generalize and prefer responding safely. Many attempts have been made in either multi-turn settings from a one-to-many perspective or in a many-to-many perspective but limited to single-turn settings. The major challenge to many-to-many augment multi-turn dialogues is that discretely replacing each turn with semantic similarity breaks fragile context coherence. In this paper, we propose DialoGue Path Sampling (DialoGPS) method in continuous semantic space, the first many-to-many augmentation method for multi-turn dialogues. Specifically, we map a dialogue to our extended Brownian Bridge, a special Gaussian process. We sample latent variables to form coherent dialogue paths in the continuous space. A dialogue path corresponds to a new multi-turn dialogue and is used as augmented training data. We show the effect of DialoGPS with both automatic and human evaluation.

In this paper, we define a widely neglected property in dialogue text, duality, which is a hierarchical property that is reflected in human behaviours in daily conversations: Based on the logic in a conversation (or a sentence), people can infer follow-up utterances (or tokens) based on the previous text, and vice versa. We propose a hierarchical duality learning for dialogue (HDLD) to simulate this human cognitive ability, for generating high quality responses that connect both previous and follow-up dialogues. HDLD utilizes hierarchical dualities at token hierarchy and utterance hierarchy. HDLD maximizes the mutual information between past and future utterances. Thus, even if future text is invisible during inference, HDLD is capable of estimating future information implicitly based on dialogue history and generates both coherent and informative responses. In contrast to previous approaches that solely utilize future text as auxiliary information to encode during training, HDLD leverages duality to enable interaction between dialogue history and the future. This enhances the utilization of dialogue data, leading to the improvement in both automatic and human evaluation.

Over the past few years, we’ve witnessed an enormous interest in stock price movement prediction using AI techniques. In recent literature, auxiliary data has been used to improve prediction accuracy, such as textual news. When predicting a particular stock, we assume that information from other stocks should also be utilized as auxiliary data to enhance performance. In this paper, we propose the Causality-guided Multi-memory Interaction Network (CMIN), a novel end-to-end deep neural network for stock movement prediction which, for the first time, models the multi-modality between financial text data and causality-enhanced stock correlations to achieve higher prediction accuracy. CMIN transforms the basic attention mechanism into Causal Attention by calculating transfer entropy between multivariate stocks in order to avoid attention on spurious correlations. Furthermore, we introduce a fusion mechanism to model the multi-directional interactions through which CMIN learns not only the self-influence but also the interactive influence in information flows representing the interrelationship between text and stock correlations. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated by experiments on three real-world datasets collected from the U.S. and Chinese markets, where CMIN outperforms existing models to establish a new state-of-the-art prediction accuracy.

Previous research has demonstrated the potential of multi-task learning to foster a conversational agent’s ability to acquire a variety of skills. However, these approaches either suffer from interference among different datasets (also known as negative transfer), or fail to effectively reuse knowledge and skills learned from other datasets. In contrast to previous works, we develop a sparsely activated modular network: (1) We propose a well-rounded set of operators and instantiate each operator with an independent module; (2) We formulate dialogue generation as the execution of a generated programme which recursively composes and assembles modules. Extensive experiments on 9 datasets verify the efficacy of our methods through automatic evaluation and human evaluation. Notably, our model outperforms state-of-the-art supervised approaches on 4 datasets with only 10% training data thanks to the modular architecture and multi-task learning.

Unsupervised sentence representation learning is one of the fundamental problems in natural language processing with various downstream applications. Recently, contrastive learning has been widely adopted which derives high-quality sentence representations by pulling similar semantics closer and pushing dissimilar ones away. However, these methods fail to capture the fine-grained ranking information among the sentences, where each sentence is only treated as either positive or negative. In many real-world scenarios, one needs to distinguish and rank the sentences based on their similarities to a query sentence, e.g., very relevant, moderate relevant, less relevant, irrelevant, etc. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, RankCSE, for unsupervised sentence representation learning, which incorporates ranking consistency and ranking distillation with contrastive learning into a unified framework. In particular, we learn semantically discriminative sentence representations by simultaneously ensuring ranking consistency between two representations with different dropout masks, and distilling listwise ranking knowledge from the teacher. An extensive set of experiments are conducted on both semantic textual similarity (STS) and transfer (TR) tasks. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our approach over several state-of-the-art baselines.

Dialogue, the most fundamental and specially privileged arena of language, gains increasing ubiquity across the Web in recent years. Quickly going through the long dialogue context and capturing salient information scattered over the whole dialogue session benefit users in many real-world Web applications such as email thread summarization and meeting minutes draft. Dialogue summarization is a challenging task in that dialogue has dynamic interaction nature and presumably inconsistent information flow among various speakers. Many researchers address this task by modeling dialogue with pre-computed static graph structure using external linguistic toolkits. However, such methods heavily depend on the reliability of external tools and the static graph construction is disjoint with the graph representation learning phase, which makes the graph can’t be dynamically adapted for the downstream summarization task. In this paper, we propose a Static-Dynamic graph-based Dialogue Summarization model (SDDS), which fuses prior knowledge from human expertise and adaptively learns the graph structure in an end-to-end learning fashion. To verify the effectiveness of SDDS, we conduct experiments on three benchmark datasets (SAMSum, MediaSum, and DialogSum) and the results verify the superiority of SDDS.

While transformer-based pre-trained language models (PLMs) have dominated a number of NLP applications, these models are heavy to deploy and expensive to use. Therefore, effectively compressing large-scale PLMs becomes an increasingly important problem. Quantization, which represents high-precision tensors with low-bit fix-point format, is a viable solution. However, most existing quantization methods are task-specific, requiring customized training and quantization with a large number of trainable parameters on each individual task. Inspired by the observation that the over-parameterization nature of PLMs makes it possible to freeze most of the parameters during the fine-tuning stage, in this work, we propose a novel “quantize before fine-tuning” framework, PreQuant, that differs from both quantization-aware training and post-training quantization. {pasted macro ‘OUR’} is compatible with various quantization strategies, with outlier-aware parameter-efficient fine-tuning incorporated to correct the induced quantization error. We demonstrate the effectiveness of PreQuant on the GLUE benchmark using BERT, RoBERTa, and T5. We also provide an empirical investigation into the workflow of PreQuant, which sheds light on its efficacy.

Logical data-to-text generation is a representative task in measuring the capabilities of both language generation and complex reasoning. Despite the introduction of reasoning skills in generation, existing works still rely on neural language models to output the final table description. However, due to the inefficacy of neural language models in complex reasoning, these methods inevitably have difficulty working out key entities in the description and might produce unfaithful descriptions. To alleviate these issues, we propose a dependency-aware symbolic reasoning framework that reasons out each entity in the table description with our designed table-compatible programming language. To figure out the dependency relationship among entities, we devise an entity scheduling mechanism to determine the order of programme synthesis such that the reasoning of an entity only relies on other “resolved” entities. Experiments on three datasets and three backbones show that ours outperforms previous methods not only in surface-level fidelity but also in logical fidelity. Notably, the proposed framework enhances GPT-2, BART and T5 with an absolute improvement of 5.7%~11.5% on SP-Acc.

Conversational search has been regarded as the next-generation search paradigm. Constrained by data scarcity, most existing methods distill the well-trained ad-hoc retriever to the conversational retriever. However, these methods, which usually initialize parameters by query reformulation to discover contextualized dependency, have trouble in understanding the dialogue structure information and struggle with contextual semantic vanishing. In this paper, we propose {pasted macro ‘FULLMODEL’} ({pasted macro ‘MODEL’}) which is a new post-training paradigm with three self-supervised tasks to efficiently initialize the conversational search model to enhance the dialogue structure and contextual semantic understanding. Furthermore, the {pasted macro ‘MODEL’} can be plugged into most of the existing conversational models to boost their performance. To verify the effectiveness of our proposed method, we apply the conversational encoder post-trained by {pasted macro ‘MODEL’} on the conversational search task using two benchmark datasets: CAsT-19 and CAsT-20.Extensive experiments that our {pasted macro ‘MODEL’} can boost the performance of several existing conversational search methods. Our source code is available at https://github.com/morecry/SSP.

Pre-trained language models (PLM) have made impressive results in a wide range of NLP tasks and it has been revealed that one of the key factors to their success is the parameters of these models implicitly learn various types of knowledge in the pre-training corpus. However, encoding knowledge implicitly in the model parameters has two fundamental drawbacks. First, the knowledge is neither editable nor scalable once the model is trained, which is especially problematic in that knowledge is consistently evolving. Second, it lacks interpretability and prevents us from understanding what kind of knowledge PLM needs to solve a certain task. In this paper, we introduce {pasted macro ‘MODEL’}, a pre-training model with differentiable plug-in memory (DPM). The key intuition behind is to decouple the knowledge storage from model parameters with an editable and scalable key-value memory and leverage knowledge in an explainable manner by knowledge retrieval in the {pasted macro ‘MEMORY’}. We conduct extensive experiments under various settings to justify this design choice. In domain adaptation setting, {pasted macro ‘MODEL’} could be easily adapted to different domains with pluggable in-domain memory—obtaining 3.95 F1 improvements across four domains, without any in-domain training. {pasted macro ‘MODEL’} could also keep absorbing new knowledge after pre-training is done by knowledge updating operation in the {pasted macro ‘MEMORY’} without re-training. Finally, we show that by incorporating training samples into {pasted macro ‘MEMORY’} with knowledge prompting, {pasted macro ‘MODEL’} could further be improved by the instruction of in-task knowledge.

Stylized dialogue generation systems aim to produce coherent and context-aware dialogues while effectively emulating the desired style. Generating stylized dialogue is valuable yet challenging due to the scarce parallel data. Existing methods often synthesize pseudo data through back translation, yet suffer from noisy and context-agnostic style signals caused by insufficient guidance on target style features. To address this, we propose the knowledge-augmented stylized dialogue generation model, which includes a feature-guided style knowledge selection module that utilizes context and response features. Specifically, we retrieve dialogue-related style sentences from style corpus to explicitly provide clear style signals. We design a feature-guided selection module with response-related contrastive learning and style responsiveness Kullback-Leibler losses to enhance generation at both semantic and stylized levels. Our approach demonstrates satisfactory performance on two public stylized dialogue benchmarks in both automatic and human evaluations.

Multi-turn response selection aims to retrieve a response for a dialogue context from a candidate pool and negative sampling is the key to its retrieval performance. However, previous methods of negative samples tend to yield false negatives due to the one-to-many property in open-domain dialogue, which is detrimental to the optimization process. To deal with the problem, we propose a sequential variational ladder auto-encoder to capture the diverse one-to-many transition pattern of multiple characteristics in open-domain dialogue. The learned transition logic thus assists in identifying potential positives in disguise. Meanwhile, we propose a TRIGGER framework to adjust negative sampling in the training process such that the scope of false negatives dynamically updates according to the model capacity. Extensive experiments on two benchmarks verify the effectiveness of our approach.

Large-scale pre-trained language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, the massive size of these models poses huge challenges for their deployment in real-world applications. While numerous model compression techniques have been proposed, most of them are not well-suited for achieving extreme model compression when there is a significant gap in model scale. In this paper, we introduce a novel compression paradigm called Retrieval-based Knowledge Transfer (RetriKT), which effectively transfers the knowledge of LLMs to extremely small-scale models (e.g., 1%). In particular, our approach extracts knowledge from LLMs to construct a knowledge store, from which the small-scale model can retrieve relevant information and leverage it for effective inference. To improve the quality of the model, soft prompt tuning and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) reinforcement learning techniques are employed. Extensive experiments are conducted on low-resource tasks from SuperGLUE and GLUE benchmarks. The results demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly enhances the performance of small-scale models by leveraging the knowledge from LLMs.

In-context learning (ICL) is an emerging capability of large autoregressive language models where a few input-label demonstrations are appended to the input to enhance the model’s understanding of downstream NLP tasks, without directly adjusting the model parameters. The effectiveness of ICL can be attributed to the strong language modeling capabilities of large language models (LLMs), which enable them to learn the mapping between input and labels based on in-context demonstrations. Despite achieving promising results, the causal nature of language modeling in ICL restricts the attention to be backward only, i.e., a token only attends to its previous tokens, failing to capture the full input-label information and limiting the model’s performance. In this paper, we propose a novel ICL method called Repeated Demonstration with Sliding Causal Attention, (RdSca). Specifically, we duplicate later demonstrations and concatenate them to the front, allowing the model to ‘observe’ the later information even under the causal restriction. Besides, we introduce sliding causal attention, which customizes causal attention to avoid information leakage. Experimental results show that our method significantly improves the input-label mapping in ICL demonstrations. We also conduct an in-depth analysis of how to customize the causal attention without training, which has been an unexplored area in previous research.

Recent advancements in biological research leverage the integration of molecules, proteins, and natural language to enhance drug discovery. However, current models exhibit several limitations, such as the generation of invalid molecular SMILES, underutilization of contextual information, and equal treatment of structured and unstructured knowledge. To address these issues, we propose BioT5, a comprehensive pre-training framework that enriches cross-modal integration in biology with chemical knowledge and natural language associations. BioT5 utilizes SELFIES for 100% robust molecular representations and extracts knowledge from the surrounding context of bio-entities in unstructured biological literature. Furthermore, BioT5 distinguishes between structured and unstructured knowledge, leading to more effective utilization of information. After fine-tuning, BioT5 shows superior performance across a wide range of tasks, demonstrating its strong capability of capturing underlying relations and properties of bio-entities. Our code is available at https://github.com/QizhiPei/BioT5.

Knowledge-grounded dialogue (KGC) shows excellent potential to deliver an engaging and informative response. However, existing approaches emphasize selecting one golden knowledge given a particular dialogue context, overlooking the one-to-many phenomenon in dialogue. As a result, existing paradigm limits the diversity of knowledge selection and generation. To this end, we establish a multi-reference KGC dataset and propose a series of metrics to systematically assess the one-to-many efficacy of existing KGC models. Furthermore, to extend the hypothesis space of knowledge selection to enhance the mapping relationship between multiple knowledge and multiple responses, we devise a span-based variational model and optimize the model in a wake-sleep style with an ameliorated evidence lower bound objective to learn the one-to-many generalization. Both automatic and human evaluations demonstrate the efficacy of our approach.

Retrieval-augmented Neural Machine Translation models have been successful in many translation scenarios. Different from previous works that make use of mutually similar but redundant translation memories (TMs), we propose a new retrieval-augmented NMT to model contrastively retrieved translation memories that are holistically similar to the source sentence while individually contrastive to each other providing maximal information gain in three phases. First, in TM retrieval phase, we adopt contrastive retrieval algorithm to avoid redundancy and uninformativeness of similar translation pieces. Second, in memory encoding stage, given a set of TMs we propose a novel Hierarchical Group Attention module to gather both local context of each TM and global context of the whole TM set. Finally, in training phase, a Multi-TM contrastive learning objective is introduced to learn salient feature of each TM with respect to target sentence. Experimental results show that our framework obtains substantial improvements over strong baselines in the benchmark dataset.

In a citation graph, adjacent paper nodes share related scientific terms and topics. The graph thus conveys unique structure information of document-level relatedness that can be utilized in the paper summarization task, for exploring beyond the intra-document information.In this work, we focus on leveraging citation graphs to improve scientific paper extractive summarization under different settings.We first propose a Multi-granularity Unsupervised Summarization model (MUS) as a simple and low-cost solution to the task.MUS finetunes a pre-trained encoder model on the citation graph by link prediction tasks.Then, the abstract sentences are extracted from the corresponding paper considering multi-granularity information.Preliminary results demonstrate that citation graph is helpful even in a simple unsupervised framework.Motivated by this, we next propose a Graph-based Supervised Summarizationmodel (GSS) to achieve more accurate results on the task when large-scale labeled data are available.Apart from employing the link prediction as an auxiliary task, GSS introduces a gated sentence encoder and a graph information fusion module to take advantage of the graph information to polish the sentence representation.Experiments on a public benchmark dataset show that MUS and GSS bring substantial improvements over the prior state-of-the-art model.

With the availability of massive general-domain dialogue data, pre-trained dialogue generation appears to be super appealing to transfer knowledge from the general domain to downstream applications. In most existing work, such transferable ability is mainly obtained by fitting a large model with hundreds of millions of parameters on massive data in an exhaustive way, leading to inefficient running and poor interpretability. This paper proposes a novel dialogue generation model with a latent structure that is easily transferable from the general domain to downstream tasks in a lightweight and transparent way. Experiments on two benchmarks validate the effectiveness of the proposed model. Thanks to the transferable latent structure, our model is able to yield better dialogue responses than four strong baselines in terms of both automatic and human evaluations, and our model with about 22% parameters particularly delivers a 5x speedup in running time compared with the strongest baseline. Moreover, the proposed model is explainable by interpreting the discrete latent variables.

Grounding dialogue generation by extra knowledge has shown great potentials towards building a system capable of replying with knowledgeable and engaging responses. Existing studies focus on how to synthesize a response with proper knowledge, yet neglect that the same knowledge could be expressed differently by speakers even under the same context. In this work, we mainly consider two aspects of knowledge expression, namely the structure of the response and style of the content in each part. We therefore introduce two sequential latent variables to represent the structure and the content style respectively. We propose a segmentation-based generation model and optimize the model by a variational approach to discover the underlying pattern of knowledge expression in a response. Evaluation results on two benchmarks indicate that our model can learn the structure style defined by a few examples and generate responses in desired content style.

Applying existing methods to emotional support conversation—which provides valuable assistance to people who are in need—has two major limitations: (a) they generally employ a conversation-level emotion label, which is too coarse-grained to capture user’s instant mental state; (b) most of them focus on expressing empathy in the response(s) rather than gradually reducing user’s distress. To address the problems, we propose a novel model MISC, which firstly infers the user’s fine-grained emotional status, and then responds skillfully using a mixture of strategy. Experimental results on the benchmark dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and reveal the benefits of fine-grained emotion understanding as well as mixed-up strategy modeling.

Typical generative dialogue models utilize the dialogue history to generate the response. However, since one dialogue utterance can often be appropriately answered by multiple distinct responses, generating a desired response solely based on the historical information is not easy. Intuitively, if the chatbot can foresee in advance what the user would talk about (i.e., the dialogue future) after receiving its response, it could possibly provide a more informative response. Accordingly, we propose a novel dialogue generation framework named ProphetChat that utilizes the simulated dialogue futures in the inference phase to enhance response generation. To enable the chatbot to foresee the dialogue future, we design a beam-search-like roll-out strategy for dialogue future simulation using a typical dialogue generation model and a dialogue selector. With the simulated futures, we then utilize the ensemble of a history-to-response generator and a future-to-response generator to jointly generate a more informative response. Experiments on two popular open-domain dialogue datasets demonstrate that ProphetChat can generate better responses over strong baselines, which validates the advantages of incorporating the simulated dialogue futures.

Knowledge-grounded conversation (KGC) shows great potential in building an engaging and knowledgeable chatbot, and knowledge selection is a key ingredient in it. However, previous methods for knowledge selection only concentrate on the relevance between knowledge and dialogue context, ignoring the fact that age, hobby, education and life experience of an interlocutor have a major effect on his or her personal preference over external knowledge. Without taking the personalization issue into account, it is difficult for existing dialogue systems to select the proper knowledge and generate persona-consistent responses. In this work, we introduce personal memory into knowledge selection in KGC to address the personalization issue. We propose a variational method to model the underlying relationship between one’s personal memory and his or her selection of knowledge, and devise a learning scheme in which the forward mapping from personal memory to knowledge and its inverse mapping is included in a closed loop so that they could teach each other. Experiment results show that our methods outperform existing KGC methods significantly on both automatic evaluation and human evaluation.

Contrastive learning has achieved impressive success in generation tasks to militate the “exposure bias” problem and discriminatively exploit the different quality of references. Existing works mostly focus on contrastive learning on the instance-level without discriminating the contribution of each word, while keywords are the gist of the text and dominant the constrained mapping relationships. Hence, in this work, we propose a hierarchical contrastive learning mechanism, which can unify hybrid granularities semantic meaning in the input text. Concretely, we first propose a keyword graph via contrastive correlations of positive-negative pairs to iteratively polish the keyword representations. Then, we construct intra-contrasts within instance-level and keyword-level, where we assume words are sampled nodes from a sentence distribution. Finally, to bridge the gap between independent contrast levels and tackle the common contrast vanishing problem, we propose an inter-contrast mechanism that measures the discrepancy between contrastive keyword nodes respectively to the instance distribution. Experiments demonstrate that our model outperforms competitive baselines on paraphrasing, dialogue generation, and storytelling tasks.

The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis suggests that for any over-parameterized model, a small subnetwork exists to achieve competitive performance compared to the backbone architecture. In this paper, we study whether there is a winning lottery ticket for pre-trained language models, which allow the practitioners to fine-tune the parameters in the ticket but achieve good downstream performance. To achieve this, we regularize the fine-tuning process with L1 distance and explore the subnetwork structure (what we refer to as the “dominant winning ticket”). Empirically, we show that (a) the dominant winning ticket can achieve performance that is comparable with that of the full-parameter model, (b) the dominant winning ticket is transferable across different tasks, (c) and the dominant winning ticket has a natural structure within each parameter matrix. Strikingly, we find that a dominant winning ticket that takes up 0.05% of the parameters can already achieve satisfactory performance, indicating that the PLM is significantly reducible during fine-tuning.

Extractive text summarisation aims to select salient sentences from a document to form a short yet informative summary. While learning-based methods have achieved promising results, they have several limitations, such as dependence on expensive training and lack of interpretability. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel non-learning-based method by for the first time formulating text summarisation as an Optimal Transport (OT) problem, namely Optimal Transport Extractive Summariser (OTExtSum). Optimal sentence extraction is conceptualised as obtaining an optimal summary that minimises the transportation cost to a given document regarding their semantic distributions. Such a cost is defined by the Wasserstein distance and used to measure the summary’s semantic coverage of the original document. Comprehensive experiments on four challenging and widely used datasets - MultiNews, PubMed, BillSum, and CNN/DM demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art non-learning-based methods and several recent learning-based methods in terms of the ROUGE metric.

Recently, retrieval models based on dense representations are dominant in passage retrieval tasks, due to their outstanding ability in terms of capturing semantics of input text compared to the traditional sparse vector space models. A common practice of dense retrieval models is to exploit a dual-encoder architecture to represent a query and a passage independently. Though efficient, such a structure loses interaction between the query-passage pair, resulting in inferior accuracy. To enhance the performance of dense retrieval models without loss of efficiency, we propose a GNN-encoder model in which query (passage) information is fused into passage (query) representations via graph neural networks that are constructed by queries and their top retrieved passages. By this means, we maintain a dual-encoder structure, and retain some interaction information between query-passage pairs in their representations, which enables us to achieve both efficiency and efficacy in passage retrieval. Evaluation results indicate that our method significantly outperforms the existing models on MSMARCO, Natural Questions and TriviaQA datasets, and achieves the new state-of-the-art on these datasets.

Procedural text is a widely used genre that contains many steps of instructions of how to cook a dish or how to conduct a chemical experiment and analyze the procedural text has become a popular task in the NLP field. Since the procedural text can be very long and contains many details, summarizing the whole procedural text or giving an overview for each complicated procedure step can save time for readers and help them to capture the core information in the text. In this paper, we propose the procedural text summarization task with two summarization granularity: step-view and global-view, which summarizes each step in the procedural text separately or gives an overall summary for all steps respectively. To tackle this task, we propose an Entity-State Graph-based Summarizer (ESGS) which is based on state-of-the-art entity state tracking methods and constructs a heterogeneous graph to aggregate contextual information for each procedure. In order to help the summarization model focus on the salient entities, we propose to use the contextualized procedure graph representation to predict the salient entities. Experiments conducted on two datasets verify the effectiveness of our proposed model. Our code and datasets will be released on https://github.com/gsh199449/procedural-summ.

Building retrieval-based dialogue models that can predict appropriate responses based on the understanding of multi-turn context messages is a challenging problem. Early models usually concatenate all utterances or independently encode each dialogue turn, which may lead to an inadequate understanding of dialogue status. Although a few researchers have noticed the importance of context modeling in multi-turn response prediction, there is no systematic comparison to analyze how to model context effectively and no framework to unify those methods. In this paper, instead of configuring new architectures, we investigate how to improve existing models with a better context modeling method. Specifically, we heuristically summarize three categories of turn-aware context modeling strategies which model the context messages from the perspective of sequential relationship, local relationship, and query-aware manner respectively. A Turn-Aware Context Modeling (TACM) layer is explored to flexibly adapt and unify these context modeling strategies to several advanced response selection models. Evaluation results on three public data sets indicate that employing each individual context modeling strategy or multiple strategies can consistently improve the performance of existing models.

Word embeddings learned from massive text collections have demonstrated significant levels of discriminative biases. However, debias on the Chinese language, one of the most spoken languages, has been less explored. Meanwhile, existing literature relies on manually created supplementary data, which is time- and energy-consuming. In this work, we propose the first Chinese Gender-neutral word Embedding model (CGE) based on Word2vec, which learns gender-neutral word embeddings without any labeled data. Concretely, CGE utilizes and emphasizes the rich feminine and masculine information contained in radicals, i.e., a kind of component in Chinese characters, during the training procedure. This consequently alleviates discriminative gender biases. Experimental results on public benchmark datasets show that our unsupervised method outperforms the state-of-the-art supervised debiased word embedding models without sacrificing the functionality of the embedding model.

Recently, many studies are emerging towards building a retrieval-based dialogue system that is able to effectively leverage background knowledge (e.g., documents) when conversing with humans. However, it is non-trivial to collect large-scale dialogues that are naturally grounded on the background documents, which hinders the effective and adequate training of knowledge selection and response matching. To overcome the challenge, we consider decomposing the training of the knowledge-grounded response selection into three tasks including: 1) query-passage matching task; 2) query-dialogue history matching task; 3) multi-turn response matching task, and joint learning all these tasks in a unified pre-trained language model. The former two tasks could help the model in knowledge selection and comprehension, while the last task is designed for matching the proper response with the given query and background knowledge (dialogue history). By this means, the model can be learned to select relevant knowledge and distinguish proper response, with the help of ad-hoc retrieval corpora and a large number of ungrounded multi-turn dialogues. Experimental results on two benchmarks of knowledge-grounded response selection indicate that our model can achieve comparable performance with several existing methods that rely on crowd-sourced data for training.

Given a set of related publications, related work section generation aims to provide researchers with an overview of the specific research area by summarizing these works and introducing them in a logical order. Most of existing related work generation models follow the inflexible extractive style, which directly extract sentences from multiple original papers to form a related work discussion. Hence, in this paper, we propose a Relation-aware Related work Generator (RRG), which generates an abstractive related work from the given multiple scientific papers in the same research area. Concretely, we propose a relation-aware multi-document encoder that relates one document to another according to their content dependency in a relation graph. The relation graph and the document representation are interacted and polished iteratively, complementing each other in the training process. We also contribute two public datasets composed of related work sections and their corresponding papers. Extensive experiments on the two datasets show that the proposed model brings substantial improvements over several strong baselines. We hope that this work will promote advances in related work generation task.

Sequential information, a.k.a., orders, is assumed to be essential for processing a sequence with recurrent neural network or convolutional neural network based encoders. However, is it possible to encode natural languages without orders? Given a bag of words from a disordered sentence, humans may still be able to understand what those words mean by reordering or reconstructing them. Inspired by such an intuition, in this paper, we perform a study to investigate how “order” information takes effects in natural language learning. By running comprehensive comparisons, we quantitatively compare the ability of several representative neural models to organize sentences from a bag of words under three typical scenarios, and summarize some empirical findings and challenges, which can shed light on future research on this line of work.

We study knowledge-grounded dialogue generation with pre-trained language models. To leverage the redundant external knowledge under capacity constraint, we propose equipping response generation defined by a pre-trained language model with a knowledge selection module, and an unsupervised approach to jointly optimizing knowledge selection and response generation with unlabeled dialogues. Empirical results on two benchmarks indicate that our model can significantly outperform state-of-the-art methods in both automatic evaluation and human judgment.

The challenge of both achieving task completion by querying the knowledge base and generating human-like responses for task-oriented dialogue systems is attracting increasing research attention. In this paper, we propose a “Two-Teacher One-Student” learning framework (TTOS) for task-oriented dialogue, with the goal of retrieving accurate KB entities and generating human-like responses simultaneously. TTOS amalgamates knowledge from two teacher networks that together provide comprehensive guidance to build a high-quality task-oriented dialogue system (student network). Each teacher network is trained via reinforcement learning with a goal-specific reward, which can be viewed as an expert towards the goal and transfers the professional characteristic to the student network. Instead of adopting the classic student-teacher learning of forcing the output of a student network to exactly mimic the soft targets produced by the teacher networks, we introduce two discriminators as in generative adversarial network (GAN) to transfer knowledge from two teachers to the student. The usage of discriminators relaxes the rigid coupling between the student and teachers. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets (i.e., CamRest and In-Car Assistant) demonstrate that TTOS significantly outperforms baseline methods.

As the E-commerce thrives, high-quality online advertising copywriting has attracted more and more attention. Different from the advertising copywriting for a single product, an advertisement (AD) post includes an attractive topic that meets the customer needs and description copywriting about several products under its topic. A good AD post can highlight the characteristics of each product, thus helps customers make a good choice among candidate products. Hence, multi-product AD post generation is meaningful and important. We propose a novel end-to-end model named S-MG Net to generate the AD post. Targeted at such a challenging real-world problem, we split the AD post generation task into two subprocesses: (1) select a set of products via the SelectNet (Selection Network). (2) generate a post including selected products via the MGenNet (Multi-Generator Network). Concretely, SelectNet first captures the post topic and the relationship among the products to output the representative products. Then, MGenNet generates the description copywriting of each product. Experiments conducted on a large-scale real-world AD post dataset demonstrate that our proposed model achieves impressive performance in terms of both automatic metrics as well as human evaluations.

A popular multimedia news format nowadays is providing users with a lively video and a corresponding news article, which is employed by influential news media including CNN, BBC, and social media including Twitter and Weibo. In such a case, automatically choosing a proper cover frame of the video and generating an appropriate textual summary of the article can help editors save time, and readers make the decision more effectively. Hence, in this paper, we propose the task of Video-based Multimodal Summarization with Multimodal Output (VMSMO) to tackle such a problem. The main challenge in this task is to jointly model the temporal dependency of video with semantic meaning of article. To this end, we propose a Dual-Interaction-based Multimodal Summarizer (DIMS), consisting of a dual interaction module and multimodal generator. In the dual interaction module, we propose a conditional self-attention mechanism that captures local semantic information within video and a global-attention mechanism that handles the semantic relationship between news text and video from a high level. Extensive experiments conducted on a large-scale real-world VMSMO dataset show that DIMS achieves the state-of-the-art performance in terms of both automatic metrics and human evaluations.

Training the generative models with minimal corpus is one of the critical challenges for building open-domain dialogue systems. Existing methods tend to use the meta-learning framework which pre-trains the parameters on all non-target tasks then fine-tunes on the target task. However, fine-tuning distinguishes tasks from the parameter perspective but ignores the model-structure perspective, resulting in similar dialogue models for different tasks. In this paper, we propose an algorithm that can customize a unique dialogue model for each task in the few-shot setting. In our approach, each dialogue model consists of a shared module, a gating module, and a private module. The first two modules are shared among all the tasks, while the third one will differentiate into different network structures to better capture the characteristics of the corresponding task. The extensive experiments on two datasets show that our method outperforms all the baselines in terms of task consistency, response quality, and diversity.

Understanding neural models is a major topic of interest in the deep learning community. In this paper, we propose to interpret a general neural model comparatively. Specifically, we study the sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) model in the contexts of two mainstream NLP tasks–machine translation and dialogue response generation–as they both use the seq2seq model. We investigate how the two tasks are different and how their task difference results in major differences in the behaviors of the resulting translation and dialogue generation systems. This study allows us to make several interesting observations and gain valuable insights, which can be used to help develop better translation and dialogue generation models. To our knowledge, no such comparative study has been done so far.

Story generation is a challenging task of automatically creating natural languages to describe a sequence of events, which requires outputting text with not only a consistent topic but also novel wordings. Although many approaches have been proposed and obvious progress has been made on this task, there is still a large room for improvement, especially for improving thematic consistency and wording diversity. To mitigate the gap between generated stories and those written by human writers, in this paper, we propose a planning-based conditional variational autoencoder, namely Plan-CVAE, which first plans a keyword sequence and then generates a story based on the keyword sequence. In our method, the keywords planning strategy is used to improve thematic consistency while the CVAE module allows enhancing wording diversity. Experimental results on a benchmark dataset confirm that our proposed method can generate stories with both thematic consistency and wording novelty, and outperforms state-of-the-art methods on both automatic metrics and human evaluations.

Currently, researchers have paid great attention to retrieval-based dialogues in open-domain. In particular, people study the problem by investigating context-response matching for multi-turn response selection based on publicly recognized benchmark data sets. State-of-the-art methods require a response to interact with each utterance in a context from the beginning, but the interaction is performed in a shallow way. In this work, we let utterance-response interaction go deep by proposing an interaction-over-interaction network (IoI). The model performs matching by stacking multiple interaction blocks in which residual information from one time of interaction initiates the interaction process again. Thus, matching information within an utterance-response pair is extracted from the interaction of the pair in an iterative fashion, and the information flows along the chain of the blocks via representations. Evaluation results on three benchmark data sets indicate that IoI can significantly outperform state-of-the-art methods in terms of various matching metrics. Through further analysis, we also unveil how the depth of interaction affects the performance of IoI.

We study learning of a matching model for response selection in retrieval-based dialogue systems. The problem is equally important with designing the architecture of a model, but is less explored in existing literature. To learn a robust matching model from noisy training data, we propose a general co-teaching framework with three specific teaching strategies that cover both teaching with loss functions and teaching with data curriculum. Under the framework, we simultaneously learn two matching models with independent training sets. In each iteration, one model transfers the knowledge learned from its training set to the other model, and at the same time receives the guide from the other model on how to overcome noise in training. Through being both a teacher and a student, the two models learn from each other and get improved together. Evaluation results on two public data sets indicate that the proposed learning approach can generally and significantly improve the performance of existing matching models.

Due to its potential applications, open-domain dialogue generation has become popular and achieved remarkable progress in recent years, but sometimes suffers from generic responses. Previous models are generally trained based on 1-to-1 mapping from an input query to its response, which actually ignores the nature of 1-to-n mapping in dialogue that there may exist multiple valid responses corresponding to the same query. In this paper, we propose to utilize the multiple references by considering the correlation of different valid responses and modeling the 1-to-n mapping with a novel two-step generation architecture. The first generation phase extracts the common features of different responses which, combined with distinctive features obtained in the second phase, can generate multiple diverse and appropriate responses. Experimental results show that our proposed model can effectively improve the quality of response and outperform existing neural dialogue models on both automatic and human evaluations.

We study how to sample negative examples to automatically construct a training set for effective model learning in retrieval-based dialogue systems. Following an idea of dynamically adapting negative examples to matching models in learning, we consider four strategies including minimum sampling, maximum sampling, semi-hard sampling, and decay-hard sampling. Empirical studies on two benchmarks with three matching models indicate that compared with the widely used random sampling strategy, although the first two strategies lead to performance drop, the latter two ones can bring consistent improvement to the performance of all the models on both benchmarks.

Previous research on dialogue systems generally focuses on the conversation between two participants, yet multi-party conversations which involve more than two participants within one session bring up a more complicated but realistic scenario. In real multi- party conversations, we can observe who is speaking, but the addressee information is not always explicit. In this paper, we aim to tackle the challenge of identifying all the miss- ing addressees in a conversation session. To this end, we introduce a novel who-to-whom (W2W) model which models users and utterances in the session jointly in an interactive way. We conduct experiments on the benchmark Ubuntu Multi-Party Conversation Corpus and the experimental results demonstrate that our model outperforms baselines with consistent improvements.

Variational autoencoders (VAEs) and Wasserstein autoencoders (WAEs) have achieved noticeable progress in open-domain response generation. Through introducing latent variables in continuous space, these models are capable of capturing utterance-level semantics, e.g., topic, syntactic properties, and thus can generate informative and diversified responses. In this work, we improve the WAE for response generation. In addition to the utterance-level information, we also model user-level information in latent continue space. Specifically, we embed user-level and utterance-level information into two multimodal distributions, and combine these two multimodal distributions into a mixed distribution. This mixed distribution will be used as the prior distribution of WAE in our proposed model, named as PersonaWAE. Experimental results on a large-scale real-world dataset confirm the superiority of our model for generating informative and personalized responses, where both automatic and human evaluations outperform state-of-the-art models.

Under special circumstances, summaries should conform to a particular style with patterns, such as court judgments and abstracts in academic papers. To this end, the prototype document-summary pairs can be utilized to generate better summaries. There are two main challenges in this task: (1) the model needs to incorporate learned patterns from the prototype, but (2) should avoid copying contents other than the patternized words—such as irrelevant facts—into the generated summaries. To tackle these challenges, we design a model named Prototype Editing based Summary Generator (PESG). PESG first learns summary patterns and prototype facts by analyzing the correlation between a prototype document and its summary. Prototype facts are then utilized to help extract facts from the input document. Next, an editing generator generates new summary based on the summary pattern or extracted facts. Finally, to address the second challenge, a fact checker is used to estimate mutual information between the input document and generated summary, providing an additional signal for the generator. Extensive experiments conducted on a large-scale real-world text summarization dataset show that PESG achieves the state-of-the-art performance in terms of both automatic metrics and human evaluations.

Text style transfer task requires the model to transfer a sentence of one style to another style while retaining its original content meaning, which is a challenging problem that has long suffered from the shortage of parallel data. In this paper, we first propose a semi-supervised text style transfer model that combines the small-scale parallel data with the large-scale nonparallel data. With these two types of training data, we introduce a projection function between the latent space of different styles and design two constraints to train it. We also introduce two other simple but effective semi-supervised methods to compare with. To evaluate the performance of the proposed methods, we build and release a novel style transfer dataset that alters sentences between the style of ancient Chinese poem and the modern Chinese.

Different from other text generation tasks, in product description generation, it is of vital importance to generate faithful descriptions that stick to the product attribute information. However, little attention has been paid to this problem. To bridge this gap we propose a model named Fidelity-oriented Product Description Generator (FPDG). FPDG takes the entity label of each word into account, since the product attribute information is always conveyed by entity words. Specifically, we first propose a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) decoder based on the Entity-label-guided Long Short-Term Memory (ELSTM) cell, taking both the embedding and the entity label of each word as input. Second, we establish a keyword memory that stores the entity labels as keys and keywords as values, and FPDG will attend to keywords through attending to their entity labels. Experiments conducted a large-scale real-world product description dataset show that our model achieves the state-of-the-art performance in terms of both traditional generation metrics as well as human evaluations. Specifically, FPDG increases the fidelity of the generated descriptions by 25%.

Many modern neural document summarization systems based on encoder-decoder networks are designed to produce abstractive summaries. We attempted to verify the degree of abstractiveness of modern neural abstractive summarization systems by calculating overlaps in terms of various types of units. Upon the observation that many abstractive systems tend to be near-extractive in practice, we also implemented a pure copy system, which achieved comparable results as abstractive summarizers while being far more computationally efficient. These findings suggest the possibility for future efforts towards more efficient systems that could better utilize the vocabulary in the original document.

It is a challenging task to automatically compose poems with not only fluent expressions but also aesthetic wording. Although much attention has been paid to this task and promising progress is made, there exist notable gaps between automatically generated ones with those created by humans, especially on the aspects of term novelty and thematic consistency. Towards filling the gap, in this paper, we propose a conditional variational autoencoder with adversarial training for classical Chinese poem generation, where the autoencoder part generates poems with novel terms and a discriminator is applied to adversarially learn their thematic consistency with their titles. Experimental results on a large poetry corpus confirm the validity and effectiveness of our model, where its automatic and human evaluation scores outperform existing models.

In this paper, we introduce Iterative Text Summarization (ITS), an iteration-based model for supervised extractive text summarization, inspired by the observation that it is often necessary for a human to read an article multiple times in order to fully understand and summarize its contents. Current summarization approaches read through a document only once to generate a document representation, resulting in a sub-optimal representation. To address this issue we introduce a model which iteratively polishes the document representation on many passes through the document. As part of our model, we also introduce a selective reading mechanism that decides more accurately the extent to which each sentence in the model should be updated. Experimental results on the CNN/DailyMail and DUC2002 datasets demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art extractive systems when evaluated by machines and by humans.

The tutorial is based on the long-term efforts on building conversational models with deep learning approaches for chatbots. We will summarize the fundamental challenges in modeling open domain dialogues, clarify the difference from modeling goal-oriented dialogues, and give an overview of state-of-the-art methods for open domain conversation including both retrieval-based methods and generation-based methods. In addition to these, our tutorial will also cover some new trends of research of chatbots, such as how to design a reasonable evaluation system and how to "control" conversations from a chatbot with some specific information such as personas, styles, and emotions, etc.

The success of many natural language processing (NLP) tasks is bound by the number and quality of annotated data, but there is often a shortage of such training data. In this paper, we ask the question: “Can we combine a neural network (NN) with regular expressions (RE) to improve supervised learning for NLP?”. In answer, we develop novel methods to exploit the rich expressiveness of REs at different levels within a NN, showing that the combination significantly enhances the learning effectiveness when a small number of training examples are available. We evaluate our approach by applying it to spoken language understanding for intent detection and slot filling. Experimental results show that our approach is highly effective in exploiting the available training data, giving a clear boost to the RE-unaware NN.

Identifying long-span dependencies between discourse units is crucial to improve discourse parsing performance. Most existing approaches design sophisticated features or exploit various off-the-shelf tools, but achieve little success. In this paper, we propose a new transition-based discourse parser that makes use of memory networks to take discourse cohesion into account. The automatically captured discourse cohesion benefits discourse parsing, especially for long span scenarios. Experiments on the RST discourse treebank show that our method outperforms traditional featured based methods, and the memory based discourse cohesion can improve the overall parsing performance significantly.

Neural conversation systems, typically using sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models, are showing promising progress recently. However, traditional seq2seq suffer from a severe weakness: during beam search decoding, they tend to rank universal replies at the top of the candidate list, resulting in the lack of diversity among candidate replies. Maximum Marginal Relevance (MMR) is a ranking algorithm that has been widely used for subset selection. In this paper, we propose the MMR-BS decoding method, which incorporates MMR into the beam search (BS) process of seq2seq. The MMR-BS method improves the diversity of generated replies without sacrificing their high relevance with the user-issued query. Experiments show that our proposed model achieves the best performance among other comparison methods.

The study on human-computer conversation systems is a hot research topic nowadays. One of the prevailing methods to build the system is using the generative Sequence-to-Sequence (Seq2Seq) model through neural networks. However, the standard Seq2Seq model is prone to generate trivial responses. In this paper, we aim to generate a more meaningful and informative reply when answering a given question. We propose an implicit content-introducing method which incorporates additional information into the Seq2Seq model in a flexible way. Specifically, we fuse the general decoding and the auxiliary cue word information through our proposed hierarchical gated fusion unit. Experiments on real-life data demonstrate that our model consistently outperforms a set of competitive baselines in terms of BLEU scores and human evaluation.

Distant supervision significantly reduces human efforts in building training data for many classification tasks. While promising, this technique often introduces noise to the generated training data, which can severely affect the model performance. In this paper, we take a deep look at the application of distant supervision in relation extraction. We show that the dynamic transition matrix can effectively characterize the noise in the training data built by distant supervision. The transition matrix can be effectively trained using a novel curriculum learning based method without any direct supervision about the noise. We thoroughly evaluate our approach under a wide range of extraction scenarios. Experimental results show that our approach consistently improves the extraction results and outperforms the state-of-the-art in various evaluation scenarios.

Generative conversational systems are attracting increasing attention in natural language processing (NLP). Recently, researchers have noticed the importance of context information in dialog processing, and built various models to utilize context. However, there is no systematic comparison to analyze how to use context effectively. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study to compare various models and investigate the effect of context information in dialog systems. We also propose a variant that explicitly weights context vectors by context-query relevance, outperforming the other baselines.

Using neural networks to generate replies in human-computer dialogue systems is attracting increasing attention over the past few years. However, the performance is not satisfactory: the neural network tends to generate safe, universally relevant replies which carry little meaning. In this paper, we propose a content-introducing approach to neural network-based generative dialogue systems. We first use pointwise mutual information (PMI) to predict a noun as a keyword, reflecting the main gist of the reply. We then propose seq2BF, a “sequence to backward and forward sequences” model, which generates a reply containing the given keyword. Experimental results show that our approach significantly outperforms traditional sequence-to-sequence models in terms of human evaluation and the entropy measure, and that the predicted keyword can appear at an appropriate position in the reply.