Zhang et al. (2020) proposed to formulate few-shot intent classification as natural language inference (NLI) between query utterances and examples in the training set. The method is known as discriminative nearest neighbor classification or DNNC. Inspired by this work, we propose to simplify the NLI-style classification pipeline to be the entailment prediction on the utterance-semantic-label-pair (USLP). The semantic information in the labels can thus been infused into the classification process. Compared with DNNC, our proposed method is more efficient in both training and serving since it is based upon the entailment between query utterance and labels instead of all the training examples. The DNNC method requires more than one example per intent while the USLP approach does not have such constraint. In the 1-shot experiments on the CLINC150 (Larson et al., 2019) dataset, the USLP method outperforms traditional classification approach by >20 points (in-domain ac- curacy). We also find that longer and semantically meaningful labels tend to benefit model performance, however, the benefit shrinks as more training data is available.

Dense neural text retrieval has achieved promising results on open-domain Question Answering (QA), where latent representations of questions and passages are exploited for maximum inner product search in the retrieval process. However, current dense retrievers require splitting documents into short passages that usually contain local, partial and sometimes biased context, and highly depend on the splitting process. As a consequence, it may yield inaccurate and misleading hidden representations, thus deteriorating the final retrieval result. In this work, we propose Dense Hierarchical Retrieval (DHR), a hierarchical framework which can generate accurate dense representations of passages by utilizing both macroscopic semantics in the document and microscopic semantics specific to each passage. Specifically, a document-level retriever first identifies relevant documents, among which relevant passages are then retrieved by a passage-level retriever. The ranking of the retrieved passages will be further calibrated by examining the document-level relevance. In addition, hierarchical title structure and two negative sampling strategies (i.e., In-Doc and In-Sec negatives) are investigated. We apply DHR to large-scale open-domain QA datasets. DHR significantly outperforms the original dense passage retriever, and helps an end-to-end QA system outperform the strong baselines on multiple open-domain QA benchmarks.

Document grounded generation is the task of using the information provided in a document to improve text generation. This work focuses on two different document grounded generation tasks: Wikipedia Update Generation task and Dialogue response generation. Our work introduces two novel adaptations of large scale pre-trained encoder-decoder models focusing on building context driven representation of the document and enabling specific attention to the information in the document. Additionally, we provide a stronger BART baseline for these tasks. Our proposed techniques outperform existing methods on both automated (at least 48% increase in BLEU-4 points) and human evaluation for closeness to reference and relevance to the document. Furthermore, we perform comprehensive manual inspection of the generated output and categorize errors to provide insights into future directions in modeling these tasks.

Dialog state tracking (DST) is a core component in task-oriented dialog systems. Existing approaches for DST mainly fall into one of two categories, namely, ontology-based and ontology-free methods. An ontology-based method selects a value from a candidate-value list for each target slot, while an ontology-free method extracts spans from dialog contexts. Recent work introduced a BERT-based model to strike a balance between the two methods by pre-defining categorical and non-categorical slots. However, it is not clear enough which slots are better handled by either of the two slot types, and the way to use the pre-trained model has not been well investigated. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective dual-strategy model for DST, by adapting a single BERT-style reading comprehension model to jointly handle both the categorical and non-categorical slots. Our experiments on the MultiWOZ datasets show that our method significantly outperforms the BERT-based counterpart, finding that the key is a deep interaction between the domain-slot and context information. When evaluated on noisy (MultiWOZ 2.0) and cleaner (MultiWOZ 2.1) settings, our method performs competitively and robustly across the two different settings. Our method sets the new state of the art in the noisy setting, while performing more robustly than the best model in the cleaner setting. We also conduct a comprehensive error analysis on the dataset, including the effects of the dual strategy for each slot, to facilitate future research.

Intent detection is one of the core components of goal-oriented dialog systems, and detecting out-of-scope (OOS) intents is also a practically important skill. Few-shot learning is attracting much attention to mitigate data scarcity, but OOS detection becomes even more challenging. In this paper, we present a simple yet effective approach, discriminative nearest neighbor classification with deep self-attention. Unlike softmax classifiers, we leverage BERT-style pairwise encoding to train a binary classifier that estimates the best matched training example for a user input. We propose to boost the discriminative ability by transferring a natural language inference (NLI) model. Our extensive experiments on a large-scale multi-domain intent detection task show that our method achieves more stable and accurate in-domain and OOS detection accuracy than RoBERTa-based classifiers and embedding-based nearest neighbor approaches. More notably, the NLI transfer enables our 10-shot model to perform competitively with 50-shot or even full-shot classifiers, while we can keep the inference time constant by leveraging a faster embedding retrieval model.

The concept of Dialogue Act (DA) is universal across different task-oriented dialogue domains - the act of “request” carries the same speaker intention whether it is for restaurant reservation or flight booking. However, DA taggers trained on one domain do not generalize well to other domains, which leaves us with the expensive need for a large amount of annotated data in the target domain. In this work, we investigate how to better adapt DA taggers to desired target domains with only unlabeled data. We propose MaskAugment, a controllable mechanism that augments text input by leveraging the pre-trained Mask token from BERT model. Inspired by consistency regularization, we use MaskAugment to introduce an unsupervised teacher-student learning scheme to examine the domain adaptation of DA taggers. Our extensive experiments on the Simulated Dialogue (GSim) and Schema-Guided Dialogue (SGD) datasets show that MaskAugment is useful in improving the cross-domain generalization for DA tagging.

This paper presents a high-quality multilingual dataset for the documentation domain to advance research on localization of structured text. Unlike widely-used datasets for translation of plain text, we collect XML-structured parallel text segments from the online documentation for an enterprise software platform. These Web pages have been professionally translated from English into 16 languages and maintained by domain experts, and around 100,000 text segments are available for each language pair. We build and evaluate translation models for seven target languages from English, with several different copy mechanisms and an XML-constrained beam search. We also experiment with a non-English pair to show that our dataset has the potential to explicitly enable 17 × 16 translation settings. Our experiments show that learning to translate with the XML tags improves translation accuracy, and the beam search accurately generates XML structures. We also discuss trade-offs of using the copy mechanisms by focusing on translation of numerical words and named entities. We further provide a detailed human analysis of gaps between the model output and human translations for real-world applications, including suitability for post-editing.

A major obstacle in reinforcement learning-based sentence generation is the large action space whose size is equal to the vocabulary size of the target-side language. To improve the efficiency of reinforcement learning, we present a novel approach for reducing the action space based on dynamic vocabulary prediction. Our method first predicts a fixed-size small vocabulary for each input to generate its target sentence. The input-specific vocabularies are then used at supervised and reinforcement learning steps, and also at test time. In our experiments on six machine translation and two image captioning datasets, our method achieves faster reinforcement learning (~2.7x faster) with less GPU memory (~2.3x less) than the full-vocabulary counterpart. We also show that our method more effectively receives rewards with fewer iterations of supervised pre-training.

Neural machine translation (NMT) has shown great success as a new alternative to the traditional Statistical Machine Translation model in multiple languages. Early NMT models are based on sequence-to-sequence learning that encodes a sequence of source words into a vector space and generates another sequence of target words from the vector. In those NMT models, sentences are simply treated as sequences of words without any internal structure. In this article, we focus on the role of the syntactic structure of source sentences and propose a novel end-to-end syntactic NMT model, which we call a tree-to-sequence NMT model, extending a sequence-to-sequence model with the source-side phrase structure. Our proposed model has an attention mechanism that enables the decoder to generate a translated word while softly aligning it with phrases as well as words of the source sentence. We have empirically compared the proposed model with sequence-to-sequence models in various settings on Chinese-to-Japanese and English-to-Japanese translation tasks. Our experimental results suggest that the use of syntactic structure can be beneficial when the training data set is small, but is not as effective as using a bi-directional encoder. As the size of training data set increases, the benefits of using a syntactic tree tends to diminish.

This paper presents a novel neural machine translation model which jointly learns translation and source-side latent graph representations of sentences. Unlike existing pipelined approaches using syntactic parsers, our end-to-end model learns a latent graph parser as part of the encoder of an attention-based neural machine translation model, and thus the parser is optimized according to the translation objective. In experiments, we first show that our model compares favorably with state-of-the-art sequential and pipelined syntax-based NMT models. We also show that the performance of our model can be further improved by pre-training it with a small amount of treebank annotations. Our final ensemble model significantly outperforms the previous best models on the standard English-to-Japanese translation dataset.

Transfer and multi-task learning have traditionally focused on either a single source-target pair or very few, similar tasks. Ideally, the linguistic levels of morphology, syntax and semantics would benefit each other by being trained in a single model. We introduce a joint many-task model together with a strategy for successively growing its depth to solve increasingly complex tasks. Higher layers include shortcut connections to lower-level task predictions to reflect linguistic hierarchies. We use a simple regularization term to allow for optimizing all model weights to improve one task’s loss without exhibiting catastrophic interference of the other tasks. Our single end-to-end model obtains state-of-the-art or competitive results on five different tasks from tagging, parsing, relatedness, and entailment tasks.

This paper describes our UT-KAY system that participated in the Workshop on Asian Translation 2016. Based on an Attention-based Neural Machine Translation (ANMT) model, we build our system by incorporating a domain adaptation method for multiple domains and an attention-based unknown word replacement method. In experiments, we verify that the attention-based unknown word replacement method is effective in improving translation scores in Chinese-to-Japanese machine translation. We further show results of manual analysis on the replaced unknown words.

This paper reports our systems (UT-AKY) submitted in the 3rd Workshop of Asian Translation 2016 (WAT’16) and their results in the English-to-Japanese translation task. Our model is based on the tree-to-sequence Attention-based NMT (ANMT) model proposed by Eriguchi et al. (2016). We submitted two ANMT systems: one with a word-based decoder and the other with a character-based decoder. Experimenting on the English-to-Japanese translation task, we have confirmed that the character-based decoder can cover almost the full vocabulary in the target language and generate translations much faster than the word-based model.