Existing dialog system models require extensive human annotations and are difficult to generalize to different tasks. The recent success of large pre-trained language models such as BERT and GPT-2 (Devlin et al., 2019; Radford et al., 2019) have suggested the effectiveness of incorporating language priors in down-stream NLP tasks. However, how much pre-trained language models can help dialog response generation is still under exploration. In this paper, we propose a simple, general, and effective framework: Alternating Recurrent Dialog Model (ARDM). ARDM models each speaker separately and takes advantage of the large pre-trained language model. It requires no supervision from human annotations such as belief states or dialog acts to achieve effective conversations. ARDM outperforms or is on par with state-of-the-art methods on two popular task-oriented dialog datasets: CamRest676 and MultiWOZ. Moreover, we can generalize ARDM to more challenging, non-collaborative tasks such as persuasion. In persuasion tasks, ARDM is capable of generating human-like responses to persuade people to donate to a charity.

Large-scale, pre-trained language models (LMs) have achieved human-level performance on a breadth of language understanding tasks. However, evaluations only based on end task performance shed little light on machines’ true ability in language understanding and reasoning. In this paper, we highlight the importance of evaluating the underlying reasoning process in addition to end performance. Toward this goal, we introduce Tiered Reasoning for Intuitive Physics (TRIP), a novel commonsense reasoning dataset with dense annotations that enable multi-tiered evaluation of machines’ reasoning process. Our empirical results show that while large LMs can achieve high end performance, they struggle to support their predictions with valid supporting evidence. The TRIP dataset and our baseline results will motivate verifiable evaluation of commonsense reasoning and facilitate future research toward developing better language understanding and reasoning models.

Entity Matching (EM) aims at recognizing entity records that denote the same real-world object. Neural EM models learn vector representation of entity descriptions and match entities end-to-end. Though robust, these methods require many annotated resources for training, and lack of interpretability. In this paper, we propose a novel EM framework that consists of Heterogeneous Information Fusion (HIF) and Key Attribute Tree (KAT) Induction to decouple feature representation from matching decision. Using self-supervised learning and mask mechanism in pre-trained language modeling, HIF learns the embeddings of noisy attribute values by inter-attribute attention with unlabeled data. Using a set of comparison features and a limited amount of annotated data, KAT Induction learns an efficient decision tree that can be interpreted by generating entity matching rules whose structure is advocated by domain experts. Experiments on 6 public datasets and 3 industrial datasets show that our method is highly efficient and outperforms SOTA EM models in most cases. We will release the codes upon acceptance.

Multi-hop reasoning has been widely studied in recent years to obtain more interpretable link prediction. However, we find in experiments that many paths given by these models are actually unreasonable, while little work has been done on interpretability evaluation for them. In this paper, we propose a unified framework to quantitatively evaluate the interpretability of multi-hop reasoning models so as to advance their development. In specific, we define three metrics, including path recall, local interpretability, and global interpretability for evaluation, and design an approximate strategy to calculate these metrics using the interpretability scores of rules. We manually annotate all possible rules and establish a benchmark. In experiments, we verify the effectiveness of our benchmark. Besides, we run nine representative baselines on our benchmark, and the experimental results show that the interpretability of current multi-hop reasoning models is less satisfactory and is 51.7% lower than the upper bound given by our benchmark. Moreover, the rule-based models outperform the multi-hop reasoning models in terms of performance and interpretability, which points to a direction for future research, i.e., how to better incorporate rule information into the multi-hop reasoning model. We will publish our codes and datasets upon acceptance.

Multi-hop reasoning has been widely studied in recent years to seek an effective and interpretable method for knowledge graph (KG) completion. Most previous reasoning methods are designed for dense KGs with enough paths between entities, but cannot work well on those sparse KGs that only contain sparse paths for reasoning. On the one hand, sparse KGs contain less information, which makes it difficult for the model to choose correct paths. On the other hand, the lack of evidential paths to target entities also makes the reasoning process difficult. To solve these problems, we propose a multi-hop reasoning model over sparse KGs, by applying novel dynamic anticipation and completion strategies: (1) The anticipation strategy utilizes the latent prediction of embedding-based models to make our model perform more potential path search over sparse KGs. (2) Based on the anticipation information, the completion strategy dynamically adds edges as additional actions during the path search, which further alleviates the sparseness problem of KGs. The experimental results on five datasets sampled from Freebase, NELL and Wikidata show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Our codes and datasets can be obtained from https://github.com/THU-KEG/DacKGR.

Structured belief states are crucial for user goal tracking and database query in task-oriented dialog systems. However, training belief trackers often requires expensive turn-level annotations of every user utterance. In this paper we aim at alleviating the reliance on belief state labels in building end-to-end dialog systems, by leveraging unlabeled dialog data towards semi-supervised learning. We propose a probabilistic dialog model, called the LAtent BElief State (LABES) model, where belief states are represented as discrete latent variables and jointly modeled with system responses given user inputs. Such latent variable modeling enables us to develop semi-supervised learning under the principled variational learning framework. Furthermore, we introduce LABES-S2S, which is a copy-augmented Seq2Seq model instantiation of LABES. In supervised experiments, LABES-S2S obtains strong results on three benchmark datasets of different scales. In utilizing unlabeled dialog data, semi-supervised LABES-S2S significantly outperforms both supervised-only and semi-supervised baselines. Remarkably, we can reduce the annotation demands to 50% without performance loss on MultiWOZ.

Neural generative models have achieved promising performance on dialog generation tasks if given a huge data set. However, the lack of high-quality dialog data and the expensive data annotation process greatly limit their application in real world settings. We propose a paraphrase augmented response generation (PARG) framework that jointly trains a paraphrase model and a response generation model to improve the dialog generation performance. We also design a method to automatically construct paraphrase training data set based on dialog state and dialog act labels. PARG is applicable to various dialog generation models, such as TSCP (Lei et al., 2018) and DAMD (Zhang et al., 2019). Experimental results show that the proposed framework improves these state-of-the-art dialog models further on CamRest676 and MultiWOZ. PARG also outperforms other data augmentation methods significantly in dialog generation tasks, especially under low resource settings.