Dominican Republic

State-of-the-art conversational agents have advanced significantly in conjunction with the use of large transformer-based language models. However, even with these advancements, conversational agents still lack the ability to produce responses that are informative and coherent with the local context.
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In this work, we propose a dialog framework that incorporates both local knowledge as well as users&#39; past dialogues to generate high-quality conversations. In particular, we exploit the pasted URLs as the source of local knowledge, which widely exist in online conversations, call center services, and discussions between users on social media. To this purpose, we build a dataset based on Reddit conversations, where outbound URL links are widely available and the hyperlinked documents can be naturally included as local external knowledge. We demonstrate that incorporating local knowledge can largely improve \emph{informativeness}, \emph{coherency} and \emph{realisticness} measure using human evaluations, and our approach consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art conversational models on the dataset across all three measures. Scaling the size of our models from 117M to 8.3B parameters yields a consistent improvement of validation perplexity as well as human evaluated metrics. Our 8.3B parameters model can generate human-like responses as rated by various human evaluations in a single-turn dialog setting.

EMNLP 2021

Local Knowledge Powered Conversational Agents

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible. The experience for on-site participants would closely approximate a normal pre-COVID *ACL conference, with 5-6 thematically organized parallel sessions and live Q/A and interactive discussion immediately after the talks. Presentations by virtual participants will be equitably interleaved with those of on-site participants, projected on the auditorium screens as if on-site, and also followed immediately by live Q/A and interactive discussion at a time during reasonable waking hours for the virtual presenter. For all participants, on-site and virtual, who are unable to attend a session due to either time-zone issues or because they are participating in another session live, talk recordings and slides will be available online at a minimum after the live presentation (and in many cases before as well), and questions may be submitted in advance on session-specific discussion boards and answered live in session with the usual visual aids if desired.

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Please Note: The EMNLP registration system is not currently connected to the underline site as we are still in the process of building out EMNLP 2021. You will receive access instructions from underline the week of November 1st. 

Access is given only to EMNLP upon registration, if you have not registered please do so [here](https://2021.emnlp.org/registration).

Registered attendees will receive access the week of November 1st.

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible.

State-of-the-art conversational agents have advanced significantly in conjunction with the use of large transformer-based language models. However, even with these advancements, conversational agents still lack the ability to produce responses that are informative and coherent with the local context.
%
In this work, we propose a dialog framework that incorporates both local knowledge as well as users' past dialogues to generate high-quality conversations. In particular, we exploit the pasted URLs as the source of local knowledge, which widely exist in online conversations, call center services, and discussions between users on social media. To this purpose, we build a dataset based on Reddit conversations, where outbound URL links are widely available and the hyperlinked documents can be naturally included as local external knowledge. We demonstrate that incorporating local knowledge can largely improve \emph{informativeness}, \emph{coherency} and \emph{realisticness} measure using human evaluations, and our approach consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art conversational models on the dataset across all three measures. Scaling the size of our models from 117M to 8.3B parameters yields a consistent improvement of validation perplexity as well as human evaluated metrics. Our 8.3B parameters model can generate human-like responses as rated by various human evaluations in a single-turn dialog setting.

workshop paper

While annotating normalized times in food security documents, we found that the semantically compositional annotation for time normalization (SCATE) scheme required several near-duplicate annotations to get the correct semantics for expressions like Nov. 7th to 11th 2021.
To reduce this problem, we explored replacing SCATE's Sub-Interval property with a Super-Interval property, that is, making the smallest units (e.g., 7th and 11th) rather than the largest units (e.g., 2021) the heads of the intersection chains.
To ensure that the semantics of annotated time intervals remained unaltered despite our changes to the syntax of the annotation scheme, we applied several different techniques to validate our changes.
These validation techniques detected and allowed us to resolve several important bugs in our automated translation from Sub-Interval to Super-Interval syntax.

Simplifying annotation of intersections in time normalization annotation: exploring syntactic and semantic validation

This paper presents several challenges faced when annotating Turkish treebanks in accordance with the Universal Dependencies (UD) guidelines and proposes solutions to address them. Most of these challenges stem from the lack of adequate support in the UD framework to accurately represent null morphemes and complex derivations, which results in a significant loss of information for Turkish. This loss negatively impacts the tools that are developed based on these treebanks. 
We raised and discussed these issues within the community on the official UD portal. This paper presents these issues and our proposals to more accurately represent morphosyntactic information for Turkish while adhering to guidelines of UD. This work aims to contribute to the representation of Turkish and other agglutinative languages in UD-based treebanks, which in turn aids to develop more accurately annotated datasets for such languages.

Overcoming the challenges in morphological annotation of Turkish in universal dependencies framework

Using automatically generated VerbNet semantic representations, we extract events and their participants and predict the changes in existence and location states of entities. The results are evaluated on the ProPara dataset.

Automatic Entity State Annotation using the VerbNet Semantic Parser

A common practice in building NLP datasets, especially using crowd-sourced annotations, involves obtaining multiple annotator judgements on the same data instances, which are then flattened to produce a single ``ground truth'' label or score, through majority voting, averaging, or adjudication. While these approaches may be appropriate in certain annotation tasks, such aggregations overlook the socially constructed nature of human perceptions that annotations for relatively more subjective tasks are meant to capture. In particular, systematic disagreements between annotators owing to their socio-cultural backgrounds and/or lived experiences are often obfuscated through such aggregations. In this work, we empirically demonstrate that label aggregation may introduce representational biases of individual and group perspectives. Based on this finding, we propose a set of recommendations for increased utility and transparency of datasets for downstream use cases.

On Releasing Annotator-Level Labels and Information in Datasets

The recent advancement of digital assistant technologies has opened new possibilities in the experiences they can provide. One of them is the ability to converse with a persona, e.g., celebrities, famous fictional characters, etc. This experience requires that the replies are answered from the point of view of the persona, i.e., the first person. Since the facts about characters are typically found expressed in the third person, there is a need to rephrase them to the first person in order for the assistant not to break character and the experience to remain immersive. However, the automatic solution to such a problem is largely unexplored by the community. In this work, we present a new task for NLP: third person to first person rephrasing. We define the task and analyze its major challenges. We create and publish a novel dataset with 3493 human-annotated pairs of celebrity facts in the third person with their rephrased sentence in the first person. Moreover, we propose a transformer-based pipeline that correctly rephrases 92.8% of sentences compared to 76.2% rephrased by a rule-based baseline system.

Taking Things Personally: Third Person to First Person Rephrasing

Zhang et al. (2020) proposed to formulate few-shot intent classification as natural language inference (NLI) between query utterances and examples in the training set. The method is known as discriminative nearest neighbor classification or DNNC. Inspired by this work, we propose to simplify the NLI-style classification pipeline to be the entailment prediction on the utterance-semantic-label-pair (USLP). The semantic information in the labels can thus been infused into the classification process. Compared with DNNC, our proposed method is more efficient in both training and serving since it is based upon the entailment between query utterance and labels instead of all the training examples. The DNNC method requires more than one example per intent while the USLP approach does not have such constraint. In the 1-shot experiments on the CLINC150 (Larson et al., 2019) dataset, the USLP method outperforms traditional classification approach by >20 points (in-domain ac- curacy). We also find that longer and semantically meaningful labels tend to benefit model performance, however, the benefit shrinks as more training data is available.

Few-Shot Intent Classification by Gauging Entailment Relationship Between Utterance and Semantic Label

We propose a personalized dialogue scenario generation system which transmits efficient and coherent information with a real-time extractive summarization method optimized by an Ising machine. The summarization problem is formulated as a quadratic unconstraint binary optimization (QUBO) problem, which extracts sentences that maximize the sum of the degree of user's interest in the sentences of documents with the discourse structure of each document and the total utterance time as constraints. To evaluate the proposed method, we constructed a news article corpus with annotations of the discourse structure, users' profiles, and interests in sentences and topics. The experimental results confirmed that a Digital Annealer, which is a simulated annealing-based Ising machine, can solve our QUBO model in a practical time without violating the constraints using this dataset.

Personalized Extractive Summarization Using an Ising Machine Towards Real-time Generation of Efficient and Coherent Dialogue Scenarios

The lack of labeled training data for new features is a common problem in rapidly changing real-world dialog systems. As a solution, we propose a multilingual paraphrase generation model that can be used to generate novel utterances for a target feature and target language. The generated utterances can be used to augment existing training data to improve intent classification and slot labeling models. We evaluate the quality of generated utterances using intrinsic evaluation metrics and by conducting downstream evaluation experiments with English as the source language and nine different target languages. Our method shows promise across languages, even in a zero-shot setting where no seed data is available.

Multilingual Paraphrase Generation For Bootstrapping New Features in Task-Oriented Dialog Systems

In this paper, we explore how to use a small amount of new data to update a task-oriented semantic parsing model when the desired output for some examples has changed. When making updates in this way, one potential problem that arises is the presence of conflicting data, or out-of-date labels in the original training set. To evaluate the impact of this understudied problem, we propose an experimental setup for simulating changes to a neural semantic parser. We show that the presence of conflicting data greatly hinders learning of an update, then explore several methods to mitigate its effect. Our multi-task and data selection methods lead to large improvements in model accuracy compared to a naive data-mixing strategy, and our best method closes 86% of the accuracy gap between this baseline and an oracle upper bound.

Overcoming Conflicting Data when Updating a Neural Semantic Parser

Incremental intent classification requires the assignment of intent labels to partial utterances. However, partial utterances do not necessarily contain enough information to be mapped to the intent class of their complete utterance (correctly and with a certain degree of confidence). Using the final interpretation as the ground truth to measure a classifier's accuracy during intent classification of partial utterances is thus problematic. We release inCLINC, a dataset of partial and full utterances with human annotations of plausible intent labels for different portions of each utterance, as an upper (human) baseline for incremental intent classification. 
We analyse the incremental annotations and propose entropy reduction as a measure of human annotators' convergence on an interpretation (i.e. intent label). We argue that, when the annotators do not converge to one or a few possible interpretations and yet the classifier already identifies the final intent class early on, it is a sign of overfitting that can be ascribed to artefacts in the dataset.

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Local Knowledge Powered Conversational Agents

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Simplifying annotation of intersections in time normalization annotation: exploring syntactic and semantic validation

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