Spain

In online customer service applications, multiple chatbots that are specialized in various topics are typically developed separately and are then merged with other human agents to a single platform, presenting to the users with a unified interface. Ideally the conversation can be transparently transferred between different sources of customer support so that domain-specific questions can be answered timely and this is what we coined as a Bot-Agent symbiosis. Conversation transition is a major challenge in such online customer service and our work formalises the challenge as two core problems, namely, when to transfer and which bot or agent to transfer to and introduces a deep neural networks based approach that addresses these problems. Inspired by the net promoter score (NPS), our research reveals how the problems can be effectively solved by providing user feedback and developing deep neural networks that predict the conversation category distribution and the NPS of the dialogues. Experiments on realistic data generated from an online service support platform demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods and shows promising perspective for transparent conversation transition.

COLING 2020

When and Who? Conversation Transition Based on Bot-Agent Symbiosis Learning Network

dialog classification

bot-agent symbiosis

conversation transition

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

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

poster

stages 

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

First established in 1965, the biennial COLING conference is held in diverse parts of the globe and attracts participants from both top-ranked research centers and emerging countries. Today, the most important developments in our field are taking place not only in universities and academic research institutes, but also in industrial research departments and in technological startups. COLING conferences provide opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting developments.

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

The automatic feedback of school assignments is an important application of AI in education. In this work, we focus on the task of personalized multimodal feedback generation, which aims to generate personalized feedback for teachers to evaluate students’ assignments involving multimodal inputs such as images, audios, and texts. This task involves the representation and fusion of multimodal information and natural language generation, which presents the challenges from three aspects: (1) how to encode and integrate multimodal inputs; (2) how to generate feedback specific to each modality; and (3) how to fulfill personalized feedback generation. In this paper, we propose a novel Personalized Multimodal Feedback Generation Network (PMFGN) armed with a modality gate mechanism and a personalized bias mechanism to address these challenges. Extensive experiments on real-world K-12 education data show that our model significantly outperforms baselines by generating more accurate and diverse feedback. In addition, detailed ablation experiments are conducted to deepen our understanding of the proposed framework.

Personalized Multimodal Feedback Generation in Education

This paper develops and implements a scalable methodology for (a) estimating the noisiness of labels produced by a typical crowdsourcing semantic annotation task, and (b) reducing the resulting error of the labeling process by as much as 20-30% in comparison to other common labeling strategies. Importantly, this new approach to the labeling process, which we name Dynamic Automatic Conflict Resolution (DACR), does not require a ground truth dataset and is instead based on inter-project annotation inconsistencies. This makes DACR not only more accurate but also available to a broad range of labeling tasks. In what follows we present results from a text classification task performed at scale for a commercial personal assistant, and evaluate the inherent ambiguity uncovered by this annotation strategy as compared to other common labeling strategies.

mproving Human-Labeled Data through Dynamic Automatic Conflict Resolution

Conventional neural generative models tend to generate safe and generic responses which have little connection with previous utterances semantically and would disengage users in a dialog system. To generate relevant responses, we propose a method that employs two types of constraints - topical constraint and semantic constraint. Under the hypothesis that a response and its context have higher relevance when they share the same topics, the topical constraint encourages the topics of a response to match its context by conditioning response decoding on topic words' embeddings. The semantic constraint, which encourages a response to be semantically related to its context by regularizing the decoding objective function with semantic distance, is proposed. Optimal transport is applied to compute a weighted semantic distance between the representation of a response and the context. Generated responses are evaluated by automatic metrics, as well as human judgment, showing that the proposed method can generate more topic-relevant and content-rich responses than conventional models.

Topic-relevant response generation using optimal transport for an open-domain dialog system


Temporal sentence localization in videos aims to ground the best matched segment in an untrimmed video according to a given sentence query. Previous works in this field mainly rely on single-step attentional frameworks to align the temporal boundaries by a soft selection. Although they focus on the visual content relevant to the query, these attention strategies are insufficient to model complex video contents and restrict the higher-level reasoning demand for temporal relation. In this paper, we propose a novel deep rectification-modulation network (RMN), trans- forming this task into a multi-step reasoning process by repeating rectification and modulation. In each rectification-modulation layer, unlike existing methods directly conducting the cross-modal interaction, we first devise a rectification module to correct implicit attention misalignment which focuses on wrong position during the interaction process. Then, a modulation module is developed to model the frame-to-frame relation with the help of specific sentence information for better correlating and composing the video contents over time. With multiple such layers cascaded in depth, our RMN progressively refines video and query interactions, thus enabling a further precise localization. Experimental evaluations on three public datasets show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Extensive ablation studies are carried out for the comprehensive analysis of the proposed method.

Reasoning Step-by-Step: Temporal Sentence Localization in Videos via Deep Rectification-Modulation Network

Text summarization refers to the process that generates a shorter form of text from the source document preserving salient information. Recently, many models for text summarization have been proposed. Most of those models were evaluated using recall-oriented understudy for gisting evaluation (ROUGE) scores. However, as ROUGE scores are computed based on n-gram overlap, they do not reflect semantic meaning correspondences between generated and reference summaries. Because Korean is an agglutinative language that combines various morphemes into a word that expresses several meanings, ROUGE is not suitable for Korean summarization. In this paper, we propose evaluation metrics that reflect semantic meanings of a reference summary and the original document, Reference and Document Aware Semantic Score (RDASS). We then propose a method for improving the correlation of the metrics with human judgment. Evaluation results show that the correlation with human judgment is significantly higher for our evaluation metrics than for ROUGE scores.

Reference and Document Aware Semantic Evaluation Methods for Korean Language Summarization

Determining whether an event in a news article is a foreground or background event would be useful in many natural language processing tasks, for example, temporal relation extraction, summarization, or storyline generation. We introduce the task of distinguishing between foreground and background events in news articles as well as identifying the general temporal position of background events relative to the foreground period (past, present, future, and their combinations). We achieve good performance (0.73 F_1 for background vs. foreground and temporal position, and 0.79 F_1 for background vs. foreground only) on a dataset of news articles by leveraging discourse information in a featurized model.

Distinguishing Between Foreground and Background Events in News

Spoken language understanding (SLU), which converts user requests in natural language to machine-interpretable expressions, is becoming an essential task. The lack of training data is an important problem, especially for new system tasks, because existing SLU systems are based on statistical approaches. In this paper, we proposed to use two sources of the ``wisdom of crowds,'' crowdsourcing and knowledge community website, for improving the SLU system. We firstly collected paraphrasing variations for new system tasks through crowdsourcing as seed data, and then augmented them using similar questions from a knowledge community website. We investigated the effects of the proposed data augmentation method in SLU task, even with small seed data. In particular, the proposed architecture augmented more than 120,000 samples to improve SLU accuracies.

Improving Spoken Language Understanding by Wisdom of Crowds

In this paper, we explore a novel solution of constructing a heterogeneous graph for each instance by leveraging aspect-focused and inter-aspect contextual dependencies for the specific aspect. Based on it, we propose a novel graph-aware model with Interactive Graph Convolutional Networks (InterGCN) for aspect sentiment analysis. Specifically, an ordinary dependency graph is first constructed for each sentence over the dependency tree. Then we refine the graph by considering the syntactical dependencies between contextual words and aspect-specific words to derive the aspect-focused graph. Subsequently, the aspect-focused graph and the corresponding embedding matrix are fed into the aspect-focused GCN to capture the key aspect and contextual words. Besides, to interactively extract the dependencies between the aspect words and other aspects, an inter-aspect GCN is adopted to model the representations learned by aspect-focused GCN based on the inter-aspect graph. Hence, the model can be aware of the significant contextual and aspect words when interactively learning the sentiment features for a specific aspect. Experimental results on four benchmark datasets illustrate that our proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods and substantially boosts the performance in comparison with BERT.

Jointly Learning Aspect-Focused and Inter-Aspect Relations with Graph Convolutional Networks for Aspect Sentiment Analysis

There is a large body of work on Biomedical Entity Recognition (Bio-NER) for English, but there have only been a few attempts addressing NER for Chinese biomedical texts. Because of the growing amount of Chinese biomedical discoveries being patented, and lack of NER models for patent data, we train and evaluate NER models for the analysis of Chinese biomedical patent data, based on BERT. By doing so, we show the value and potential of this domain-specific NER task. For the evaluation of our methods we built our own Chinese biomedical patents NER dataset, and our optimized model achieved an F1 score of 0.54±0.15. Further biomedical analysis indicates that our solution can help detecting meaningful biomedical entities and novel gene-gene interactions, with limited labeled data, training time and computing power.

Named Entity Recognition for Chinese biomedical patents

In a general sense, language models are methods that learn to predict one or more words based on an already given context. Due to their unsupervised nature, they are candidates for efficient, automatic indication of dialogue quality. We demonstrate that human evaluators have a positive correlation between the output of the language models and scores.

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