Jiannan Xiang


2021

pdf bib
Assessing Dialogue Systems with Distribution Distances
Jiannan Xiang | Yahui Liu | Deng Cai | Huayang Li | Defu Lian | Lemao Liu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

2020

pdf bib
Learning to Stop: A Simple yet Effective Approach to Urban Vision-Language Navigation
Jiannan Xiang | Xin Wang | William Yang Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) is a natural language grounding task where an agent learns to follow language instructions and navigate to specified destinations in real-world environments. A key challenge is to recognize and stop at the correct location, especially for complicated outdoor environments. Existing methods treat the STOP action equally as other actions, which results in undesirable behaviors that the agent often fails to stop at the destination even though it might be on the right path. Therefore, we propose Learning to Stop (L2Stop), a simple yet effective policy module that differentiates STOP and other actions. Our approach achieves the new state of the art on a challenging urban VLN dataset Touchdown, outperforming the baseline by 6.89% (absolute improvement) on Success weighted by Edit Distance (SED).