Conversational Question Simplification (CQS) aims to simplify self-contained questions into conversational ones by incorporating some conversational characteristics, e.g., anaphora and ellipsis. Existing maximum likelihood estimation based methods often get trapped in easily learned tokens as all tokens are treated equally during training. In this work, we introduce a Reinforcement Iterative Sequence Editing (RISE) framework that optimizes the minimum Levenshtein distance through explicit editing actions. RISE is able to pay attention to tokens that are related to conversational characteristics. To train RISE, we devise an Iterative Reinforce Training (IRT) algorithm with a Dynamic Programming based Sampling (DPS) process to improve exploration. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets show that RISE significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods and generalizes well on unseen data.

A humanized dialogue system is expected to generate empathetic replies, which should be sensitive to the users’ expressed emotion. The task of empathetic dialogue generation is proposed to address this problem. The essential challenges lie in accurately capturing the nuances of human emotion and considering the potential of user feedback, which are overlooked by the majority of existing work. In response to this problem, we propose a multi-resolution adversarial model – EmpDG, to generate more empathetic responses. EmpDG exploits both the coarse-grained dialogue-level and fine-grained token-level emotions, the latter of which helps to better capture the nuances of user emotion. In addition, we introduce an interactive adversarial learning framework which exploits the user feedback, to identify whether the generated responses evoke emotion perceptivity in dialogues. Experimental results show that the proposed approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines in both content quality and emotion perceptivity.

Existing sentence regression methods for extractive summarization usually model sentence importance and redundancy in two separate processes. They first evaluate the importance f(s) of each sentence s and then select sentences to generate a summary based on both the importance scores and redundancy among sentences. In this paper, we propose to model importance and redundancy simultaneously by directly evaluating the relative importance f(s|S) of a sentence s given a set of selected sentences S. Specifically, we present a new framework to conduct regression with respect to the relative gain of s given S calculated by the ROUGE metric. Besides the single sentence features, additional features derived from the sentence relations are incorporated. Experiments on the DUC 2001, 2002 and 2004 multi-document summarization datasets show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art extractive summarization approaches.