As more and more product reviews are posted in both text and images, Multimodal Review Analysis (MRA) becomes an attractive research topic. Among the existing review analysis tasks, helpfulness prediction on review text has become predominant due to its importance for e-commerce platforms and online shops, i.e. helping customers quickly acquire useful product information. This paper proposes a new task Multimodal Review Helpfulness Prediction (MRHP) aiming to analyze the review helpfulness from text and visual modalities. Meanwhile, a novel Multi-perspective Coherent Reasoning method (MCR) is proposed to solve the MRHP task, which conducts joint reasoning over texts and images from both the product and the review, and aggregates the signals to predict the review helpfulness. Concretely, we first propose a product-review coherent reasoning module to measure the intra- and inter-modal coherence between the target product and the review. In addition, we also devise an intra-review coherent reasoning module to identify the coherence between the text content and images of the review, which is a piece of strong evidence for review helpfulness prediction. To evaluate the effectiveness of MCR, we present two newly collected multimodal review datasets as benchmark evaluation resources for the MRHP task. Experimental results show that our MCR method can lead to a performance increase of up to 8.5% as compared to the best performing text-only model. The source code and datasets can be obtained from https://github.com/jhliu17/MCR.

Cross-lingual Machine Reading Comprehension (CLMRC) remains a challenging problem due to the lack of large-scale annotated datasets in low-source languages, such as Arabic, Hindi, and Vietnamese. Many previous approaches use translation data by translating from a rich-source language, such as English, to low-source languages as auxiliary supervision. However, how to effectively leverage translation data and reduce the impact of noise introduced by translation remains onerous. In this paper, we tackle this challenge and enhance the cross-lingual transferring performance by a novel augmentation approach named Language Branch Machine Reading Comprehension (LBMRC). A language branch is a group of passages in one single language paired with questions in all target languages. We train multiple machine reading comprehension (MRC) models proficient in individual language based on LBMRC. Then, we devise a multilingual distillation approach to amalgamate knowledge from multiple language branch models to a single model for all target languages. Combining the LBMRC and multilingual distillation can be more robust to the data noises, therefore, improving the model’s cross-lingual ability. Meanwhile, the produced single multilingual model can apply to all target languages, which saves the cost of training, inference, and maintenance for multiple models. Extensive experiments on two CLMRC benchmarks clearly show the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Existing end-to-end task-oriented dialog systems struggle to dynamically model long dialog context for interactions and effectively incorporate knowledge base (KB) information into dialog generation. To conquer these limitations, we propose a Dual Dynamic Memory Network (DDMN) for multi-turn dialog generation, which maintains two core components: dialog memory manager and KB memory manager. The dialog memory manager dynamically expands the dialog memory turn by turn and keeps track of dialog history with an updating mechanism, which encourages the model to filter irrelevant dialog history and memorize important newly coming information. The KB memory manager shares the structural KB triples throughout the whole conversation, and dynamically extracts KB information with a memory pointer at each turn. Experimental results on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that DDMN significantly outperforms the strong baselines in terms of both automatic evaluation and human evaluation. Our code is available at https://github.com/siat-nlp/DDMN.