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We propose NeuralWOZ, a novel dialogue collection framework that uses model-based dialogue simulation. NeuralWOZ has two pipelined models, Collector and Labeler. Collector generates dialogues from (1) user&#39;s goal instructions, which are the user context and task constraints in natural language, and (2) system&#39;s API call results, which is a list of possible query responses for user requests from the given knowledge base. Labeler annotates the generated dialogue by formulating the annotation as a multiple-choice problem, in which the candidate labels are extracted from goal instructions and API call results. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in the zero-shot domain transfer learning for dialogue state tracking. In the evaluation, the synthetic dialogue corpus generated from NeuralWOZ achieves a new state-of-the-art with improvements of 4.4% point joint goal accuracy on average across domains, and improvements of 5.7% point of zero-shot coverage against the MultiWOZ 2.1 dataset.

IJCNLP-AACL 2021

NeuralWOZ: Learning to Collect Task-Oriented Dialogue via Model-Based Simulation

simulation

dialogue generation

task-oriented dialogue

dialogue state tracking

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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).

We propose NeuralWOZ, a novel dialogue collection framework that uses model-based dialogue simulation. NeuralWOZ has two pipelined models, Collector and Labeler. Collector generates dialogues from (1) user's goal instructions, which are the user context and task constraints in natural language, and (2) system's API call results, which is a list of possible query responses for user requests from the given knowledge base. Labeler annotates the generated dialogue by formulating the annotation as a multiple-choice problem, in which the candidate labels are extracted from goal instructions and API call results. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in the zero-shot domain transfer learning for dialogue state tracking. In the evaluation, the synthetic dialogue corpus generated from NeuralWOZ achieves a new state-of-the-art with improvements of 4.4% point joint goal accuracy on average across domains, and improvements of 5.7% point of zero-shot coverage against the MultiWOZ 2.1 dataset.

technical paper

Discrimination between antonyms and synonyms is an important and challenging NLP task. Antonyms and synonyms often share the same or similar contexts and thus are hard to make a distinction. This paper proposes two underlying hypotheses and employs the mixture-of-experts framework as a solution. It works on the basis of a divide-and-conquer strategy, where a number of localized experts focus on their own domains (or subspaces) to learn their specialties, and a gating mechanism determines the space partitioning and the expert mixture. Experimental results have shown that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the task.

A Mixture-of-Experts Model for Antonym-Synonym Discrimination

Injecting external domain-specific knowledge (e.g., UMLS) into pretrained language models (LMs) advances their capability to handle specialised in-domain tasks such as biomedical entity linking (BEL). However, such abundant expert knowledge is available only for a handful of languages (e.g., English). In this work, by proposing a novel cross-lingual biomedical entity linking task (XL-BEL) and establishing a new XL-BEL benchmark spanning 10 typologically diverse languages, we first investigate the ability of standard knowledge-agnostic as well as knowledge-enhanced monolingual and multilingual LMs beyond the standard monolingual English BEL task. The scores indicate large gaps to English performance. We then address the challenge of transferring domain-specific knowledge in resource-rich languages to resource-poor ones. To this end, we propose and evaluate a series of cross-lingual transfer methods for the XL-BEL task, and demonstrate that general-domain bitext helps propagate the available English knowledge to languages with little to no in-domain data. Remarkably, we show that our proposed domain-specific transfer methods yield consistent gains across all target languages, sometimes up to 20 Precision@1 points, without any in-domain knowledge in the target language, and without any in-domain parallel data.

Learning Domain-Specialised Representations for Cross-Lingual Biomedical Entity Linking

The representation degeneration problem in Contextual Word Representations (CWRs) hurts the expressiveness of the embedding space by forming an anisotropic cone where even unrelated words have excessively positive correlations.
Existing techniques for tackling this issue require a learning process to re-train models with additional objectives and mostly employ a global assessment to study isotropy. 
Our quantitative analysis over isotropy shows that a local assessment could be more accurate due to the clustered structure of CWRs. 
Based on this observation, we propose a local cluster-based method to address the degeneration issue in contextual embedding spaces.
We show that in clusters including punctuations and stop words, local dominant directions encode structural information, removing which can improve CWRs performance on semantic tasks. 
Moreover, we find that tense information in verb representations dominates sense semantics. 
We show that removing dominant directions of verb representations can transform the space to better suit semantic applications. 
Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed cluster-based method can mitigate the degeneration problem on multiple tasks.

A Cluster-based Approach for Improving Isotropy in Contextual Embedding Space

Open-domain dialog systems have a user-centric goal: to provide humans with an engaging conversation experience. User engagement is one of the most important metrics for evaluating open-domain dialog systems, and could also be used as real-time feedback to benefit dialog policy learning. Existing work on detecting user disengagement typically requires hand-labeling many dialog samples. We propose HERALD, an efficient annotation framework that reframes the training data annotation process as a denoising problem. Specifically, instead of manually labeling training samples, we first use a set of labeling heuristics to label training samples automatically. We then denoise the weakly labeled data using the Shapley algorithm. Finally, we use the denoised data to train a user engagement detector. Our experiments show that HERALD improves annotation efficiency significantly and achieves 86% user disengagement detection accuracy in two dialog corpora.

HERALD: An Annotation Efficient Method to Detect User Disengagement in Social Conversations

Conversational semantic parsers map user utterances to executable programs given dialogue histories composed of previous utterances, programs, and system responses. Existing parsers typically condition on rich representations of history that include the complete set of values and computations previously discussed. We propose a model that abstracts over values to focus prediction on type- and function-level context. This approach provides a compact encoding of dialogue histories and predicted programs, improving generalization and computational efficiency. Our model incorporates several other components, including an atomic span copy operation and structural enforcement of well-formedness constraints on predicted programs, that are particularly advantageous in the low-data regime. Trained on the SMCalFlow and TreeDST datasets, our model outperforms prior work by 7.3% and 10.6% respectively in terms of absolute accuracy. Trained on only a thousand examples from each dataset, it outperforms strong baselines by 12.4% and 6.4%. These results indicate that simple representations are key to effective generalization in conversational semantic parsing.

Value-Agnostic Conversational Semantic Parsing

Recently, various neural models for multi-party conversation (MPC) have achieved impressive improvements on a variety of tasks such as addressee recognition, speaker identification and response prediction. However, these existing methods on MPC usually represent interlocutors and utterances individually and ignore the inherent complicated structure in MPC which may provide crucial interlocutor and utterance semantics and would enhance the conversation understanding process. To this end, we present MPC-BERT, a pre-trained model for MPC understanding that considers learning who says what to whom in a unified model with several elaborated self-supervised tasks. Particularly, these tasks can be generally categorized into (1) interlocutor structure modeling including reply-to utterance recognition, identical speaker searching and pointer consistency distinction, and (2) utterance semantics modeling including masked shared utterance restoration and shared node detection. We evaluate MPC-BERT on three downstream tasks including addressee recognition, speaker identification and response selection. Experimental results show that MPC-BERT outperforms previous methods by large margins and achieves new state-of-the-art performance on all three downstream tasks at two benchmarks.

MPC-BERT: A Pre-Trained Language Model for Multi-Party Conversation Understanding

Data augmentation with mixup has shown to be effective on various computer vision tasks. 
Despite its great success, there has been a hurdle to apply mixup to NLP tasks since text consists of discrete tokens with variable length. 
In this work, we propose SSMix, a novel mixup method where the operation is performed on input text rather than on hidden vectors like previous approaches.
SSMix synthesizes a sentence while preserving the locality of two original texts by span-based mixing and keeping more tokens related to the prediction relying on saliency information.
With extensive experiments, we empirically validate that our method outperforms hidden-level mixup methods on a wide range of text classification benchmarks, including textual entailment, sentiment classification, and question-type classification. 
Our code is available at https://github.com/clovaai/ssmix}{https://github.com/clovaai/ssmix.

SSMix: Saliency-Based Span Mixup for Text Classification

Language generation models' democratization benefits many domains, from answering health-related questions to enhancing education by providing AI-driven tutoring services. However, language generation models' democratization also makes it easier to generate human-like text at-scale for nefarious activities, from spreading misinformation to targeting specific groups with hate speech. Thus, it is essential to understand how people interact with bots and develop methods to detect bot-generated text. This paper shows that bot-generated text detection methods are more robust across datasets and models if we use information about how people respond to it rather than using the bot's text directly. We also analyze linguistic alignment, providing insight into differences between human-human and human-bot conversations.

Detecting Bot-Generated Text by Characterizing Linguistic Accommodation in Human-Bot Interactions

Ttransformer-based approaches have been successfully used to obtain state-of-the-art accuracy on natural language processing (NLP) tasks with semi-structured tables. These model architectures are typically deep, resulting in slow training and inference, especially for long inputs. To improve efficiency while maintaining a high accuracy, we propose a new architecture, DoT, a double transformer model, that decomposes the problem into two sub-tasks: A shallow pruning transformer that selects the top-K tokens, followed by a deep task-specific transformer that takes as input those K tokens. Additionally, we modify the task-specific attention to incorporate the pruning scores. The two transformers are jointly trained by optimizing the task-specific loss. We run experiments on three benchmarks, including entailment and question-answering. We show that for a small drop of accuracy, DoT improves training and inference time by at least 50%. We also show that the pruning transformer effectively selects relevant tokens enabling the end-to-end model to maintain similar accuracy as slower baseline models. Finally, we analyse the pruning and give some insight into its impact on the task model.

DoT: An efficient Double Transformer for NLP tasks with tables

Incorporating external knowledge into Named Entity Recognition (NER) systems has been widely studied in generic domain. In this paper, we focus on clinical domain where only limited data is accessible and interpretability is important. With recent advancement in technology and acceleration of clinical trials has resulted in discovery of new drugs , procedures as well as medical conditions. These factors motivate towards building robust zero-shot NER systems which can quickly adapt to new medical terminology. We propose an auxiliary gazetteer model and fuse it with NER system, which results in better robustness and interpretability across different clinical datasets. Our gazetteer based fusion model is data efficient, achieving +1.7 micro-F1 gains on i2b2 dataset using $20\%$ training data, and brings + 4.7 micro-F1 gains on novel entity mentions never presented during training. Moreover, our fusion model is able to quickly adapt to new mentions in gazetteers without re-training and the gains from the proposed fusion model are transferable to related datasets.

NeuralWOZ: Learning to Collect Task-Oriented Dialogue via Model-Based Simulation

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