Abstract Recent advancements in open-domain question answering (ODQA), that is, finding answers from large open-domain corpus like Wikipedia, have led to human-level performance on many datasets. However, progress in QA over book stories (Book QA) lags despite its similar task formulation to ODQA. This work provides a comprehensive and quantitative analysis about the difficulty of Book QA: (1) We benchmark the research on the NarrativeQA dataset with extensive experiments with cutting-edge ODQA techniques. This quantifies the challenges Book QA poses, as well as advances the published state-of-the-art with a ∼7% absolute improvement on ROUGE-L. (2) We further analyze the detailed challenges in Book QA through human studies.1 Our findings indicate that the event-centric questions dominate this task, which exemplifies the inability of existing QA models to handle event-oriented scenarios.
For many new application domains for data-to-text generation, the main obstacle in training neural models consists of a lack of training data. While usually large numbers of instances are available on the data side, often only very few text samples are available. To address this problem, we here propose a novel few-shot approach for this setting. Our approach automatically augments the data available for training by (i) generating new text samples based on replacing specific values by alternative ones from the same category, (ii) generating new text samples based on GPT-2, and (iii) proposing an automatic method for pairing the new text samples with data samples. As the text augmentation can introduce noise to the training data, we use cycle consistency as an objective, in order to make sure that a given data sample can be correctly reconstructed after having been formulated as text (and that text samples can be reconstructed from data). On both the E2E and WebNLG benchmarks, we show that this weakly supervised training paradigm is able to outperform fully supervised sequence-to-sequence models with less than 10% of the training set. By utilizing all annotated data, our model can boost the performance of a standard sequence-to-sequence model by over 5 BLEU points, establishing a new state-of-the-art on both datasets.
This paper proposes a new problem of complementary evidence identification for open-domain question answering (QA). The problem aims to efficiently find a small set of passages that covers full evidence from multiple aspects as to answer a complex question. To this end, we proposes a method that learns vector representations of passages and models the sufficiency and diversity within the selected set, in addition to the relevance between the question and passages. Our experiments demonstrate that our method considers the dependence within the supporting evidence and significantly improves the accuracy of complementary evidence selection in QA domain.
A lot of progress has been made to improve question answering (QA) in recent years, but the special problem of QA over narrative book stories has not been explored in-depth. We formulate BookQA as an open-domain QA task given its similar dependency on evidence retrieval. We further investigate how state-of-the-art open-domain QA approaches can help BookQA. Besides achieving state-of-the-art on the NarrativeQA benchmark, our study also reveals the difficulty of evidence retrieval in books with a wealth of experiments and analysis - which necessitates future effort on novel solutions for evidence retrieval in BookQA.
Being able to perform in-depth chat with humans in a closed domain is a precondition before an open-domain chatbot can be ever claimed. In this work, we take a close look at the movie domain and present a large-scale high-quality corpus with fine-grained annotations in hope of pushing the limit of movie-domain chatbots. We propose a unified, readily scalable neural approach which reconciles all subtasks like intent prediction and knowledge retrieval. The model is first pretrained on the huge general-domain data, then finetuned on our corpus. We show this simple neural approach trained on high-quality data is able to outperform commercial systems replying on complex rules. On both the static and interactive tests, we find responses generated by our system exhibits remarkably good engagement and sensibleness close to human-written ones. We further analyze the limits of our work and point out potential directions for future work
Neural network-based sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models strongly suffer from the low-diversity problem when it comes to open-domain dialogue generation. As bland and generic utterances usually dominate the frequency distribution in our daily chitchat, avoiding them to generate more interesting responses requires complex data filtering, sampling techniques or modifying the training objective. In this paper, we propose a new perspective to diversify dialogue generation by leveraging non-conversational text. Compared with bilateral conversations, non-conversational text are easier to obtain, more diverse and cover a much broader range of topics. We collect a large-scale non-conversational corpus from multi sources including forum comments, idioms and book snippets. We further present a training paradigm to effectively incorporate these text via iterative back translation. The resulting model is tested on two conversational datasets from different domains and is shown to produce significantly more diverse responses without sacrificing the relevance with context.
The neural attention model has achieved great success in data-to-text generation tasks. Though usually excelling at producing fluent text, it suffers from the problem of information missing, repetition and “hallucination”. Due to the black-box nature of the neural attention architecture, avoiding these problems in a systematic way is non-trivial. To address this concern, we propose to explicitly segment target text into fragment units and align them with their data correspondences. The segmentation and correspondence are jointly learned as latent variables without any human annotations. We further impose a soft statistical constraint to regularize the segmental granularity. The resulting architecture maintains the same expressive power as neural attention models, while being able to generate fully interpretable outputs with several times less computational cost. On both E2E and WebNLG benchmarks, we show the proposed model consistently outperforms its neural attention counterparts.
Recent research has achieved impressive results in single-turn dialogue modelling. In the multi-turn setting, however, current models are still far from satisfactory. One major challenge is the frequently occurred coreference and information omission in our daily conversation, making it hard for machines to understand the real intention. In this paper, we propose rewriting the human utterance as a pre-process to help multi-turn dialgoue modelling. Each utterance is first rewritten to recover all coreferred and omitted information. The next processing steps are then performed based on the rewritten utterance. To properly train the utterance rewriter, we collect a new dataset with human annotations and introduce a Transformer-based utterance rewriting architecture using the pointer network. We show the proposed architecture achieves remarkably good performance on the utterance rewriting task. The trained utterance rewriter can be easily integrated into online chatbots and brings general improvement over different domains.
Many text generation tasks naturally contain two steps: content selection and surface realization. Current neural encoder-decoder models conflate both steps into a black-box architecture. As a result, the content to be described in the text cannot be explicitly controlled. This paper tackles this problem by decoupling content selection from the decoder. The decoupled content selection is human interpretable, whose value can be manually manipulated to control the content of generated text. The model can be trained end-to-end without human annotations by maximizing a lower bound of the marginal likelihood. We further propose an effective way to trade-off between performance and controllability with a single adjustable hyperparameter. In both data-to-text and headline generation tasks, our model achieves promising results, paving the way for controllable content selection in text generation.
Pointer Generators have been the de facto standard for modern summarization systems. However, this architecture faces two major drawbacks: Firstly, the pointer is limited to copying the exact words while ignoring possible inflections or abstractions, which restricts its power of capturing richer latent alignment. Secondly, the copy mechanism results in a strong bias towards extractive generations, where most sentences are produced by simply copying from the source text. In this paper, we address these problems by allowing the model to “edit” pointed tokens instead of always hard copying them. The editing is performed by transforming the pointed word vector into a target space with a learned relation embedding. On three large-scale summarization dataset, we show the model is able to (1) capture more latent alignment relations than exact word matches, (2) improve word alignment accuracy, allowing for better model interpretation and controlling, (3) generate higher-quality summaries validated by both qualitative and quantitative evaluations and (4) bring more abstraction to the generated summaries.
In conversational machine comprehension, it has become one of the research hotspots integrating conversational history information through question reformulation for obtaining better answers. However, the existing question reformulation models are trained only using supervised question labels annotated by annotators without considering any feedback information from answers. In this paper, we propose a novel Answer-Supervised Question Reformulation (ASQR) model for enhancing conversational machine comprehension with reinforcement learning technology. ASQR utilizes a pointer-copy-based question reformulation model as an agent, takes an action to predict the next word, and observes a reward for the whole sentence state after generating the end-of-sequence token. The experimental results on QuAC dataset prove that our ASQR model is more effective in conversational machine comprehension. Moreover, pretraining is essential in reinforcement learning models, so we provide a high-quality annotated dataset for question reformulation by sampling a part of QuAC dataset.
Sequence-to-Sequence (seq2seq) models have become overwhelmingly popular in building end-to-end trainable dialogue systems. Though highly efficient in learning the backbone of human-computer communications, they suffer from the problem of strongly favoring short generic responses. In this paper, we argue that a good response should smoothly connect both the preceding dialogue history and the following conversations. We strengthen this connection by mutual information maximization. To sidestep the non-differentiability of discrete natural language tokens, we introduce an auxiliary continuous code space and map such code space to a learnable prior distribution for generation purpose. Experiments on two dialogue datasets validate the effectiveness of our model, where the generated responses are closely related to the dialogue context and lead to more interactive conversations.
We develop a high-quality multi-turn dialog dataset, DailyDialog, which is intriguing in several aspects. The language is human-written and less noisy. The dialogues in the dataset reflect our daily communication way and cover various topics about our daily life. We also manually label the developed dataset with communication intention and emotion information. Then, we evaluate existing approaches on DailyDialog dataset and hope it benefit the research field of dialog systems. The dataset is available on http://yanran.li/dailydialog
Deep latent variable models have been shown to facilitate the response generation for open-domain dialog systems. However, these latent variables are highly randomized, leading to uncontrollable generated responses. In this paper, we propose a framework allowing conditional response generation based on specific attributes. These attributes can be either manually assigned or automatically detected. Moreover, the dialog states for both speakers are modeled separately in order to reflect personal features. We validate this framework on two different scenarios, where the attribute refers to genericness and sentiment states respectively. The experiment result testified the potential of our model, where meaningful responses can be generated in accordance with the specified attributes.