Dominican Republic

For each goal-oriented dialog task of interest, large amounts of data need to be collected for end-to-end learning of a neural dialog system. Collecting that data is a costly and time-consuming process. Instead, we show that we can use only a small amount of data, supplemented with data from a related dialog task. Naively learning from related data fails to improve performance as the related data can be inconsistent with the target task. We describe a meta-learning based method that selectively learns from the related dialog task data. Our approach leads to significant accuracy improvements in an example dialog task.

EMNLP 2021

Learning to Learn End-to-End Goal-Oriented Dialog From Related Dialog Tasks

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

workshop paper

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 When making updates in this way, one potential problem that arises is the presence of conflicting data, or out-of-date labels in the original training set.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.

Not So Fast, Classifier – Accuracy and Entropy Reduction in Incremental Intent Classification

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' 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.

Local Knowledge Powered Conversational Agents

Intent Classification (IC) and Slot Labeling (SL) models, which form the basis of dialogue systems, often encounter noisy data in real-word environments. In this work, we investigate how robust IC/SL models are to noisy data. We collect and publicly release a test-suite for seven common noise types found in production human-to-bot conversations (abbreviations, casing, misspellings, morphological variants, paraphrases, punctuation and synonyms). On this test-suite, we show that common noise types substantially degrade the IC accuracy and SL F1 performance of state-of-the-art BERT-based IC/SL models. By leveraging cross-noise robustness transfer -- training on one noise type to improve robustness on another noise type -- we design aggregate data-augmentation approaches that increase the model performance across all seven noise types by +10.8% for IC accuracy and +15 points for SL F1 on average. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to present a single IC/SL model that is robust to a wide range of noise phenomena.

On the Robustness of Intent Classification and Slot Labeling in Goal-oriented Dialog Systems to Real-world Noise

In task-oriented dialogue systems, recent dialogue state tracking methods tend to perform one-pass generation of the dialogue state based on the previous dialogue state. The mistakes of these models made at the current turn are prone to be carried over to the next turn, causing error propagation. 
Therefore, we propose a novel Amendable Generation for Dialogue State Tracking (AG-DST), which contains a two-pass generation process: (1) generating a primitive dialogue state based on the dialogue of the current turn and the previous dialogue state, and (2) amending the primitive dialogue state from the first pass. 
With the additional amending generation pass, our model is tasked to learn more robust dialogue state tracking by amending the errors that still exist in the primitive dialogue state, which plays the role of reviser in the double-checking process and alleviates unnecessary error propagation.
Experimental results show that AG-DST significantly outperforms previous works in two active DST datasets (MultiWOZ 2.2 and WOZ 2.0), achieving new state-of-the-art performances.

Amendable Generation for Dialogue State Tracking

Improving user experience of a dialogue system often requires intensive developer effort to read conversation logs, run statistical analyses, and intuit the relative importance of system shortcomings. This paper presents a novel approach to automated analysis of conversation logs that learns the relationship between user-system interactions and overall dialogue quality. Unlike prior work on utterance-level quality prediction, our approach learns the impact of each interaction from the overall user rating without utterance-level annotation, allowing resultant model conclusions to be derived on the basis of empirical evidence and at low cost. Our model identifies interactions that have a strong correlation with the overall dialogue quality in a chatbot setting. Experiments show that the automated analysis from our model agrees with expert judgments, making this work the first to show that such weakly-supervised learning of utterance-level quality prediction is highly achievable.

What Went Wrong? Explaining Overall Dialogue Quality through Utterance-Level Impacts

Intelligent personal assistants (IPAs) such as Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and Apple Siri extend their built-in capabilities by supporting voice apps developed by third-party developers. Sometimes the smart assistant is not able to successfully respond to user voice commands (aka utterances). There are many reasons including automatic speech recognition (ASR) error, natural language understanding (NLU) error, routing utterances to an irrelevant voice app or simply that the user is asking for a capability that is not supported yet. The failure to handle a voice command leads to customer frustration. In this paper, we introduce a fallback skill recommendation system to suggest a voice app to a customer for an unhandled voice command.
One of the prominent challenges of developing a skill recommender system for IPAs is partial observation. To solve the partial observation problem, we propose collaborative data relabeling (CDR) method. In addition, CDR also improves the diversity of the recommended skills. We evaluate the proposed method both offline and online. The offline evaluation results show that the proposed system outperforms the baselines. The online A/B testing results show significant gain of customer experience metrics.

Collaborative Data Relabeling for Robust and Diverse Voice Apps Recommendation in Intelligent Personal Assistants

Large-scale pretrained transformer models have demonstrated state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in a variety of NLP tasks. Nowadays, numerous pretrained models are available in different model flavors and different languages, and can be easily adapted to one’s downstream task. However, only a limited number of models are available for dialogue tasks, and in particular, goal-oriented dialogue tasks. In addition, the available pretrained models are trained on general domain language, creating a mismatch between the pretraining language and the downstream domain launguage. In this contribution, we present CS-BERT, a BERT model pretrained on millions of dialogues in the customer service domain. We evaluate CSBERT on several downstream customer service dialogue tasks, and demonstrate that our indomain pretraining is advantageous compared to other pretrained models in both zero-shot experiments as well as in finetuning experiments, especially in a low-resource data setting.

CS-BERT: a pretrained model for customer service dialogues

Large-scale conversation models are turning to leveraging external knowledge to improve the factual accuracy in response generation. Considering the infeasibility to annotate the external knowledge for large-scale dialogue corpora, it is desirable to learn the knowledge selection and response generation in an unsupervised manner. In the presentation, we will introduce our proposed PLATO-KAG, an unsupervised learning approach for end-to-end knowledge-grounded conversation modeling. For each dialogue context, the top-k relevant knowledge elements are selected and then employed in knowledge-grounded response generation. The two components of knowledge selection and response generation are optimized jointly and effectively under a balanced objective. Experimental results on two publicly available datasets validate the superiority of PLATO-KAG.

PLATO-KAG: Unsupervised Knowledge-Grounded Conversation via Joint Modeling

Dialogue state tracking models play an important role in a task-oriented dialogue system. However, most of them model the slot types conditionally independently given the input. We discover that it may cause the model to be confused by slot types that share the same data type. To mitigate this issue, we propose TripPy-MRF and TripPy-LSTM that models the slots jointly. Our results show that they are able to alleviate the confusion mentioned above, and they push the state-of-the-art on dataset MultiWoZ 2.1 from 58.7 to 61.3.

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Learning to Learn End-to-End Goal-Oriented Dialog From Related Dialog Tasks

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Overcoming Conflicting Data when Updating a Neural Semantic Parser

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