Thailand

We present a data-driven, end-to-end approach to transaction-based dialog systems that performs at near-human levels in terms of verbal response quality and factual grounding accuracy. We show that two essential components of the system produce these results: a sufficiently large and diverse, in-domain labeled dataset, and a neural network-based, pre-trained model that generates both verbal responses and API call predictions. In terms of data, we introduce TicketTalk, a movie ticketing dialog dataset with 23,789 annotated conversations. The conversations range from completely open-ended and unrestricted to more structured, both in terms of their knowledge base, discourse features, and number of turns. In qualitative human evaluations, model-generated responses trained on just 10,000 TicketTalk dialogs were rated to “make sense” 86.5% of the time, almost the same as human responses in the same contexts. Our simple, API-focused annotation schema results in a much easier labeling task making it faster and more cost effective. It is also the key component for being able to predict API calls accurately. We handle factual grounding by incorporating API calls in the training data, allowing our model to learn which actions to take and when. Trained on the same 10,000-dialog set, the model’s API call predictions were rated to be correct 93.9% of the time in our evaluations, surpassing the ratings for the corresponding human labels. We show how API prediction and response generation scores improve as the dataset size incrementally increases from 5000 to 21,000 dialogs. Our analysis also clearly illustrates the benefits of pre-training. To facilitate future work on transaction-based dialog systems, we are publicly releasing the TicketTalk dataset at https://git.io/JL8an.

ACL-IJCNLP 2021

TicketTalk: Toward human-level performance with end-to-end, transaction-based dialog systems

neural representations

probing

interpretability

**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). 

As in previous years, the program of the conference includes a poster session, tutorials, workshops and demonstrations in addition to the main conference.


We were able to keep the registration fees similar to those charged for the virtual ACL 2020. The one fee allows attendance at the main conference and any/all tutorials and workshops. These fees would be $125 Regular Early and $175 Regular Late; $50 Student Early and $75 Student Late. Early registration closes at midnight July 11, 2021 (Eastern Daylight Time).

**Reminder:** It is ACL’s policy that at least one author of each accepted paper (including ACL Finding papers) must register for the conference.

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Registration is now open

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

technical paper

Existing approaches for the Table-to-Text task suffer from issues such as missing information, hallucination and repetition. Many approaches to this problem use Reinforcement Learning (RL), which maximizes a single manually defined reward, such as BLEU. In this work, we instead pose the Table-to-Text task as Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) problem. We explore using multiple interpretable unsupervised reward components that are combined linearly to form a composite reward function. The composite reward function and the description generator are learned jointly. We find that IRL outperforms strong RL baselines marginally. We further study the generalization of learned IRL rewards in scenarios involving domain adaptation. Our experiments reveal significant challenges in using IRL for this task.

How Helpful is Inverse Reinforcement Learning for Table-to-Text Generation?

Stereotypical language expresses widely-held beliefs about different social categories. Many stereotypes are overtly negative, while others may appear positive on the surface, but still lead to negative consequences. In this work, we present a computational approach to interpreting stereotypes in text through the Stereotype Content Model (SCM), a comprehensive causal theory from social psychology. The SCM proposes that stereotypes can be understood along two primary dimensions: warmth and competence. We present a method for defining warmth and competence axes in semantic embedding space, and show that the four quadrants defined by this subspace accurately represent the warmth and competence concepts, according to annotated lexicons. We then apply our computational SCM model to textual stereotype data and show that it compares favourably with survey-based studies in the psychological literature. Furthermore, we explore various strategies to counter stereotypical beliefs with anti-stereotypes. It is known that countering stereotypes with anti-stereotypical examples is one of the most effective ways to reduce biased thinking, yet the problem of generating anti-stereotypes has not been previously studied. Thus, a better understanding of how to generate realistic and effective anti-stereotypes can contribute to addressing pressing societal concerns of stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination.

Understanding and Countering Stereotypes: A Computational Approach to the Stereotype Content Model

Misinformation has recently become a well-documented matter of public concern. Existing studies on this topic have hitherto adopted a coarse concept of misinformation, which incorporates a broad spectrum of story types ranging from political conspiracies to misinterpreted pranks. This paper aims to structurize these misinformation stories by leveraging fact-check articles. Our intuition is that key phrases in a fact-check article that identify the misinformation type(s) (e.g., doctored images, urban legends) also act as rationales that determine the verdict of the fact-check (e.g., false). We experiment on rationalized models with domain knowledge as weak supervision to extract these phrases as rationales, and then cluster semantically similar rationales to summarize prevalent misinformation types. Using archived fact-checks from Snopes.com, we identify ten types of misinformation stories. We discuss how these types have evolved over the last ten years and compare their prevalence between the 2016/2020 US presidential elections and the H1N1/COVID-19 pandemics.

Structurizing Misinformation Stories via Rationalizing Fact-Checks

People debate on a variety of topics on online platforms such as Reddit, or Facebook. Debates can be lengthy, with users exchanging a wealth of information and opinions. However, conversations do not always go smoothly, and users sometimes engage in unsound argumentation techniques to prove a claim. These techniques are called fallacies. Fallacies are persuasive arguments that provide insufficient or incorrect evidence to support the claim. In this paper, we study the most frequent fallacies on Reddit, and we present them using the pragma-dialectical theory of argumentation. We construct a new annotated dataset of fallacies, using user comments containing fallacy mentions as noisy labels, and cleaning the data via crowdsourcing. Finally, we study the task of classifying fallacies using neural models. We find that generally the models perform better in the presence of conversational context.We have released the data and the code at github.com/sahaisaumya/informal_fallacies.

Breaking Down the Invisible Wall of Informal Fallacies in Online Discussions

Inferring social relations from dialogues is vital for building emotionally intelligent robots to interpret human language better and act accordingly. We model the social network as an And-or Graph, named SocAoG, for the consistency of relations among a group and leveraging attributes as inference cues. Moreover, we formulate a sequential structure prediction task, and propose an $\alpha$-$\beta$-$\gamma$ strategy to incrementally parse SocAoG for the dynamic inference upon any incoming utterance: (i) an $\alpha$ process predicting attributes and relations conditioned on the semantics of dialogues, (ii) a $\beta$ process updating the social relations based on related attributes, and (iii) a $\gamma$ process updating individual's attributes based on interpersonal social relations. Empirical results on DialogRE and MovieGraph show that our model infers social relations more accurately than the state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, the ablation study shows the three processes complement each other, and the case study demonstrates the dynamic relational inference.

SocAoG: Incremental Graph Parsing for Social Relation Inference in Dialogues

Emotion cause analysis (ECA) has been an emerging topic in natural language processing, which aims to identify the reasons behind a certain emotion expressed in the text. Most ECA methods intend to identify the clause which contains the cause of a given emotion, but such clause-level ECA (CECA) can be ambiguous and imprecise. In this paper, we aim at span-level ECA (SECA) by detecting the precise boundaries of text spans conveying accurate emotion causes from the given context. We formulate this task as sequence labeling and position identification problems and design two neural methods to solve them. Experiments on two benchmark ECA datasets show that the proposed methods substantially outperform the existing ECA models.

Boundary Detection with BERT for Span-level Emotion Cause Analysis

In multi-hop QA, answering complex questions entails iterative document retrieval for finding the missing entity of the question. The main steps of this process are sub-question detection, document retrieval for the sub-question, and generation of a new query for the final document retrieval. However, building a dataset that contains complex questions with sub-questions and their corresponding documents requires costly human annotation. To address the issue, we propose a new method for weakly supervised multi-hop retriever pre-training without human efforts. Our method includes 1) a pre-training task for generating vector representations of complex questions, 2) a scalable data generation method that produces the nested structure of question and sub-question as weak supervision for pre-training, and 3) a pre-training model structure based on dense encoders. We conduct experiments to compare the performance of our pre-trained retriever with several state-of-the-art models on end-to-end multi-hop QA as well as document retrieval. The experimental results show that our pre-trained retriever is effective and also robust on limited data and computational resources.

Weakly Supervised Pre-Training for Multi-Hop Retriever

Existing rumor detection strategies typically provide detection labels while ignoring their explanation. Nonetheless, providing pieces of evidence to explain why a suspicious tweet is rumor is essential. As such, a novel model, LOSIRD, was proposed in this paper. First, LOSIRD mines appropriate evidence sentences and classifies them by automatically checking the veracity of the relationship of the given claim and its evidence from about 5 million Wikipedia documents. LOSIRD then automatically constructs two heterogeneous graph objects to simulate the propagation layout of the tweets and code the relationship of evidence. Finally, a graphSAGE processing component is used in LOSIRD to provide the label and evidence. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first one who combines objective facts and subjective views to verify rumor. The experimental results on two real-world Twitter datasets showed that our model exhibited the best performance in the early rumor detection task and its rumor detection performance outperformed other baseline and state-of-the-art models. Moreover, we confirmed that both objective information and subjective information are fundamental clues for rumor detection.

Meet The Truth: Leverage Objective Facts and Subjective Views for Interpretable Rumor Detection

Chinese Spell Checking (CSC) aims to detect and correct erroneous characters for user-generated text in the Chinese language. 
Most of the Chinese spelling errors are misused semantically, phonetically or graphically similar characters. 
Previous attempts noticed this phenomenon and try to use the similarity for this task. However, these methods use either heuristics or handcrafted confusion sets to predict the correct character. In this paper, we propose a Chinese spell checker called ReaLiSe, by directly leveraging the multimodal information of the Chinese characters. 
The ReaLiSe model tackles the CSC task by (1) capturing the semantic, phonetic and graphic information of the input characters, and (2) selectively mixing the information in these modalities to predict the correct output. Experiments on the SIGHAN benchmarks show that the proposed model outperforms strong baselines by a large margin.

Read, Listen, and See: Leveraging Multimodal Information Helps Chinese Spell Checking

We investigate if, given a simple symbol masking strategy,
self-attention models are capable of learning nested structures and
generalise over their depth. We do so in the simplest setting
possible, namely languages consisting of nested parentheses of several
kinds. We use encoder-only models, which we train to predict randomly
masked symbols, in a BERT-like fashion. We find that the accuracy is
well above random baseline, with accuracy consistently above 50% both
when increasing nesting depth and distances between training and
testing. However, we find that the predictions made correspond to a
simple parenthesis counting strategy, rather than a push-down
automaton. This suggests that self-attention models are not suitable
for tasks which require generalisation to more complex instances of
recursive structures than those found in the training set.

TicketTalk: Toward human-level performance with end-to-end, transaction-based dialog systems

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TicketTalk: Toward human-level performance with end-to-end, transaction-based dialog systems

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