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One of the difficulties in training dialogue systems is the lack of training data. We explore the possibility of creating dialogue data through the interaction between a dialogue system and a user simulator. Our goal is to develop a modelling framework that can incorporate new dialogue scenarios through self-play between the two agents. In this framework, we first pre-train the two agents on a collection of source domain dialogues, which equips the agents to converse with each other via natural language. With further fine-tuning on a small amount of target domain data, the agents continue to interact with the aim of improving their behaviors using reinforcement learning with structured reward functions. In experiments on the MultiWOZ dataset, two practical transfer learning problems are investigated: 1) domain adaptation and 2) single-to-multiple domain transfer. We demonstrate that the proposed framework is highly effective in bootstrapping the performance of the two agents in transfer learning. We also show that our method leads to improvements in dialogue system performance on complete datasets.

IJCNLP-AACL 2021

Transferable Dialogue Systems and User Simulators

self-play

user simulators

task-oriented dialogues

dialogue systems

transfer learning

reinforcement learning

**Welcome to ACL-IJCNLP 2021!**

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP). 

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The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

technical paper

This paper focuses on Seq2Seq (S2S) constrained text generation where the text generator is constrained to mention specific words which are inputs to the encoder in the generated outputs. Pre-trained S2S models or a Copy Mechanism are trained to copy the
surface tokens from encoders to decoders, but they cannot guarantee constraint satisfaction. Constrained decoding algorithms always produce hypotheses satisfying all constraints. However, they are computationally expensive and can lower the generated text quality. In this paper, we propose Mention Flags (MF), which traces whether lexical constraints are satisfied in the generated outputs in an S2S decoder. The MF models can be trained to generate tokens in a hypothesis until all constraints are satisfied, guaranteeing high constraint satisfaction. Our experiments on the Common Sense Generation task (CommonGen) (Lin et al., 2020), End2end Restaurant Dialog task (E2ENLG) (Duˇsek et al., 2020) and Novel Object Captioning task (nocaps) (Agrawal et al., 2019) show that the MF models maintain higher constraint satisfaction and text quality than the baseline models and other constrained decoding algorithms, achieving state-of-the-art performance on all three tasks. These results are achieved with a much lower run-time than constrained decoding algorithms. We also show that the MF models work well in the low-resource setting.

Mention Flags (MF): Constraining Transformer-based Text Generators

Concept-to-text Natural Language Generation is the task of expressing an input meaning representation in natural language. Previous approaches in this task have been able to generalise to rare or unseen instances by relying on a delexicalisation of the input. However, this often requires that the input appears verbatim in the output text. This poses challenges in multilingual settings, where the task expands to generate the output text in multiple languages given the same input. In this paper, we explore the application of multilingual models in concept-to-text and propose Language Agnostic Delexicalisation, a novel delexicalisation method that uses multilingual pretrained embeddings, and employs a character-level post-editing model to inflect words in their correct form during relexicalisation. Our experiments across five datasets and five languages show that multilingual models outperform monolingual models in concept-to-text and that our framework outperforms previous approaches, especially in low resource conditions.

Generalising Multilingual Concept-to-Text NLG with Language Agnostic Delexicalisation

Large-scale pretrained language models have led to dramatic improvements in text generation. Impressive performance can be achieved by finetuning only on a small number of instances (few-shot setting). Nonetheless, almost all previous work simply applies random sampling to select the few-shot training instances. Little to no attention has been paid to the selection strategies and how they would affect model performance. In this work, we present a study on training instance selection in few-shot neural text generation. 
The selection decision is made based only on the unlabeled data so as to identify the most worthwhile data points that should be annotated under some budget of labeling cost. 
Based on the intuition that the few-shot training instances should be diverse and representative of the entire data distribution, we propose a simple selection strategy with K-means clustering. 
We show that even with the naive clustering-based approach, the generation models consistently outperform random sampling on three text generation tasks: data-to-text generation, document summarization and question generation. 
The code and training data are made available. We hope that this work will call for more attention on this largely unexplored area.

On Training Instance Selection for Few-Shot Neural Text Generation

Nowadays, open-domain dialogue models can generate acceptable responses according to the historical context based on the large-scale pre-trained language models. However, they generally concatenate the dialogue history directly as the model input to predict the response, which we named as the \emph{flat pattern} and ignores the dynamic information flow across dialogue utterances. In this work, we propose the \textbf{DialoFlow} model, in which we introduce a dynamic flow mechanism to model the context flow, and design three training objectives to capture the information dynamics across dialogue utterances by addressing the semantic influence brought about by each utterance in large-scale pre-training. Experiments on the multi-reference Reddit Dataset and DailyDialog Dataset demonstrate that our DialoFlow significantly outperforms the DialoGPT on the dialogue generation task.
Besides, we propose the \textbf{Flow score}, an effective automatic metric for evaluating interactive human-bot conversation quality based on the pre-trained DialoFlow, which presents high chatbot-level correlation ($r=0.9$) with human ratings among 11 chatbots. Code and pre-trained models will be public. \footnote{\url{https://github.com/ictnlp/DialoFlow}}

Conversations Are Not Flat: Modeling the Dynamic Information Flow across Dialogue Utterances

The goal of dialogue state tracking (DST) is to predict the current dialogue state given all previous dialogue contexts. Existing approaches generally predict the dialogue state at every turn from scratch. However, the overwhelming majority of the slots in each turn should simply inherit the slot values from the previous turn. Therefore, the mechanism of treating slots equally in each turn not only is inefficient but also may lead to additional errors because of the redundant slot value generation. To address this problem, we devise the two-stage DSS-DST which consists of the Dual Slot Selector based on the current turn dialogue, and the Slot Value Generator based on the dialogue history. The Dual Slot Selector determines each slot whether to update slot value or to inherit the slot value from the previous turn from two aspects: (1) if there is a strong relationship between it and the current turn dialogue utterances; (2) if a slot value with high reliability can be obtained for it through the current turn dialogue. The slots selected to be updated are permitted to enter the Slot Value Generator to update values by a hybrid method, while the other slots directly inherit the values from the previous turn. Empirical results show that our method achieves 56.93%, 60.73%, and 58.04% joint accuracy on MultiWOZ 2.0, MultiWOZ 2.1, and MultiWOZ 2.2 datasets respectively and achieves a new state-of-the-art performance with significant improvements.

Dual Slot Selector via Local Reliability Verification for Dialogue State Tracking

Recently, deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved great success in semantically challenging NLP tasks, yet it remains unclear whether DNN models can capture compositional meanings, those aspects of meaning that have been long studied in formal semantics. To investigate this issue, we propose a Systematic Generalization testbed based on Natural language Semantics (SyGNS), whose challenge is to map natural language sentences to multiple forms of scoped meaning representations, designed to account for various semantic phenomena. Using SyGNS, we test whether neural networks can systematically parse sentences involving novel combinations of logical expressions such as quantifiers and negation. Experiments show that Transformer and GRU models can generalize to unseen combinations of quantifiers, negations, and modifiers that are similar to given training instances in form, but not to the others. We also find that the generalization performance to unseen combinations is better when the form of meaning representations is simpler. The data and code for SyGNS are publicly available at https://github.com/verypluming/SyGNS.

SyGNS: A Systematic Generalization Testbed Based on Natural Language Semantics

Fully non-autoregressive neural machine translation (NAT) simultaneously predicts tokens with single forward of neural networks, which significantly reduces the inference latency at the expense of quality drop compared to the Transformer baseline. In this work, we target on closing the performance gap while maintaining the latency advantage. We first inspect the fundamental issues of fully NAT models, and adopt dependency reduction in the learning space of output tokens as the primary guidance. Then, we revisit methods in four different aspects that have been proven effective for improving NAT models, and carefully combine these techniques with necessary modifications. Our extensive experiments on three translation benchmarks show that the proposed system achieves the state-of-the-art results for fully NAT models, and obtains comparable performance with the autoregressive and iterative NAT systems. For instance, one of the proposed models achieves 27.49 BLEU points on WMT14 En-De with 16.5X speed-up compared to similar sized autoregressive baseline under the same inference condition. The implementation of our model is available here.

Fully Non-autoregressive Neural Machine Translation: Tricks of the Trade

Countermeasures to effectively fight the ever increasing hate speech online without blocking freedom of speech is of great social interest. Natural Language Generation (NLG), is uniquely capable of developing scalable solutions. However, off-the-shelf NLG methods are primarily sequence-to-sequence neural models and they are limited in that they generate commonplace, repetitive and safe responses regardless of the hate speech (e.g., "Please refrain from using such language.") or irrelevant responses, making them ineffective for de-escalating hateful conversations. In this paper, we design a three-module pipeline approach to effectively improve the diversity and relevance. Our proposed pipeline first generates various counterspeech candidates by a generative model to promote diversity, then filters the ungrammatical ones using a BERT model, and finally selects the most relevant counterspeech response using a novel retrieval-based method. Extensive Experiments on three representative datasets demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in generating diverse and relevant counterspeech.

Generate, Prune, Select: A Pipeline for Counterspeech Generation against Online Hate Speech

Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) have achieved great success on Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) over the past few years. Although the general language representation learned from large-scale corpora does benefit MRC, the poor support in evidence extraction which requires reasoning across multiple sentences hinders PLMs from further advancing MRC. To bridge the gap between general PLMs and MRC, we present REPT, a REtrieval-based Pre-Training approach. In particular, we introduce two self-supervised tasks to strengthen evidence extraction during pre-training, which is further inherited by downstream MRC tasks through the consistent retrieval operation and model architecture. To evaluate our proposed method, we conduct extensive experiments on five MRC datasets that require collecting evidence from and reasoning across multiple sentences. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our pre-training approach. Moreover, further analysis shows that our approach is able to enhance the capacity of evidence extraction without explicit supervision.

REPT: Bridging Language Models and Machine Reading Comprehension via Retrieval-Based Pre-training

Event extraction (EE) is a crucial information extraction task that aims to extract event information in texts. Most existing methods assume that events appear in sentences without overlaps, which are not applicable to the complicated overlapping event extraction. This work systematically studies the realistic event overlapping problem, where a word may serve as triggers with several types or arguments with different roles. To tackle the above problem, we propose a novel joint learning framework with cascade decoding for overlapping event extraction, termed as CasEE. Particularly, CasEE sequentially performs type detection, trigger extraction and argument extraction, where the overlapped targets are extracted separately conditioned on the specific former prediction. All the subtasks are jointly learned in a framework to capture dependencies among the subtasks. The evaluation on a public event extraction benchmark FewFC demonstrates that CasEE achieves significant improvements on overlapping event extraction over previous competitive methods.

Transferable Dialogue Systems and User Simulators

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