Evaluating the quality of responses generated by open-domain conversation systems is a challenging task. This is partly because there can be multiple appropriate responses to a given dialogue history. Reference-based metrics that rely on comparisons to a set of known correct responses often fail to account for this variety, and consequently correlate poorly with human judgment. To address this problem, researchers have investigated the possibility of assessing response quality without using a set of known correct responses. RUBER demonstrated that an automatic response evaluation model could be made using unsupervised learning for the next-utterance prediction (NUP) task. For the unsupervised learning of such model, we propose a method of manipulating a golden response to create a new negative response that is designed to be inappropriate within the context while maintaining high similarity with the original golden response. We find, from our experiments on English datasets, that using the negative samples generated by our method alongside random negative samples can increase the model’s correlation with human evaluations. The process of generating such negative samples is automated and does not rely on human annotation.

Annotation quality control is a critical aspect for building reliable corpora through linguistic annotation. In this study, we present a simple but powerful quality control method using two-step reason selection. We gathered sentential annotations of local acceptance and three related attributes through a crowdsourcing platform. For each attribute, the reason for the choice of the attribute value is selected in a two-step manner. The options given for reason selection were designed to facilitate the detection of a nonsensical reason selection. We assume that a sentential annotation that contains a nonsensical reason is less reliable than the one without such reason. Our method, based solely on this assumption, is found to retain the annotations with satisfactory quality out of the entire annotations mixed with those of low quality.

Considering diverse aspects of an argumentative issue is an essential step for mitigating a biased opinion and making reasonable decisions. A related generation model can produce flexible results that cover a wide range of topics, compared to the retrieval-based method that may show unstable performance for unseen data. In this paper, we study the problem of generating sentential arguments from multiple perspectives, and propose a neural method to address this problem. Our model, ArgDiver (Argument generation model from diverse perspectives), in a way a conversational system, successfully generates high-quality sentential arguments. At the same time, the automatically generated arguments by our model show a higher diversity than those generated by any other baseline models. We believe that our work provides evidence for the potential of a good generation model in providing diverse perspectives on a controversial topic.

We propose a method of machine-assisted annotation for the identification of tension development, annotating whether the tension is increasing, decreasing, or staying unchanged. We use a neural network based prediction model, whose predicted results are given to the annotators as initial values for the options that they are asked to choose. By presenting such initial values to the annotators, the annotation task becomes an evaluation task where the annotators inspect whether or not the predicted results are correct. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, we performed the annotation task in both in-house and crowdsourced environments. For the crowdsourced environment, we compared the annotation results with and without our method of machine-assisted annotation. We find that the results with our method showed a higher agreement to the gold standard than those without, though our method had little effect at reducing the time for annotation. Our codes for the experiment are made publicly available.

Genetic information in the literature has been extensively looked into for the purpose of discovering the etiology of a disease. As the gene-disease relation is sensitive to external factors, their identification is important to study a disease. Environmental influences, which are usually called Gene-Environment interaction (GxE), have been considered as important factors and have extensively been researched in biology. Nevertheless, there is still a lack of systems for automatic GxE extraction from the biomedical literature due to new challenges: (1) there are no preprocessing tools and corpora for GxE, (2) expressions of GxE are often quite implicit, and (3) document-level comprehension is usually required. We propose to overcome these challenges with neural network models and show that a modified sequence-to-sequence model with a static RNN decoder produces a good performance in GxE recognition.