Korea, Republic of

Recently, a conversational question answering system has been introduced in various fields. However, building robust CQA systems requires large domain-specific datasets, and obtaining such datasets is very expensive and time consuming. In this presentation, we will introduce a novel framework that automatically generates conversational question answering data. The framework extracts question-worthy phrases from a passage and then generates corresponding questions considering previous conversations. In particular, our framework revises the extracted answers after generating questions so that answers exactly match paired questions. Experimental results prove that our framework can be utilized to construct CQA models for new domains.

COLING 2022

Conversational QA Dataset Generation with Answer Revision

question answering data generation

conversational question answering

domain adaptation

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IJCNLP-AACL 2022

The AACL, Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, and the AFNLP, Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing, invite you to participate in the 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (AACL) and the 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP). 

poster

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### THE CONFERENCE WE KNOW AND WE WANT.
**COLING**, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

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 including tech-startups. COLING provides opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting discovery.

In fall of 2022, COLING will be held in Gyeongju in a hybrid format. All participants can either present at the venue site or join virtually. As more people get vaccinated, we are happy to provide safer environments for our colleagues. We believe that COLING 2022 will be one of the conferences, free from the pandemic. The hybrid format gives presenters and sponsors a valuable opportunity to promote their companies in both an online and in-person venue. For the first time in a long time, customers can interact with their sponsor's products first-hand. The online venue, too, gives sponsors the chance to network with those unable to attend the in-person session.

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COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

Contingent reasoning is one of the essential abilities in natural language understanding, and many language resources annotated with contingent relations have been constructed.
However, despite the recent advances in deep learning, the task of contingent reasoning is still difficult for computers.
In this study, we focus on the reasoning of contingent relation between basic events.
Based on the existing data construction method, we automatically generate large-scale pseudo-problems and incorporate the generated data into training.
We also investigate the generality of contingent knowledge through quantitative evaluation by performing transfer learning on the related tasks: discourse relation analysis, the Japanese Winograd Schema Challenge, and the JCommonsenseQA.
The experimental results show the effectiveness of utilizing pseudo-problems for both the commonsense contingent reasoning task and the related tasks, which suggests the importance of contingent reasoning.

Improving Commonsense Contingent Reasoning by Pseudo-data and its Application to the Related Tasks

In a hate speech detection model, we should consider two critical aspects in addition to detection performance–bias and explainability. Hate speech cannot be identified based solely on the presence of specific words; the model should be able to reason like humans and be explainable. To improve the performance concerning the two aspects, we propose Masked Rationale Prediction (MRP) as an intermediate task. MRP is a task to predict the masked human rationales–snippets of a sentence that are grounds for human judgment–by referring to surrounding tokens combined with their un- masked rationales. As the model learns its reasoning ability based on rationales by MRP, it performs hate speech detection robustly in terms of bias and explainability. The proposed method generally achieves state-of-the-art performance in various metrics, demonstrating its effectiveness for hate speech detection. Warning: This paper contains samples that may be upsetting.

Why is it hate speech? Masked Rationale Prediction for Explainable Hate Speech Detection

The joint multiple Intent Detection (ID) and Slot Filling (SF) is a significant challenge in spoken language understanding. Because the slots in an utterance may relate to multi-intents, most existing approaches focus on utilizing task-specific components to capture the relations between intents and slots. The customized networks restrict models from modeling commonalities between tasks and generalization for broader applications. To ad- dress the above issue, we propose a Unified Generative framework (UGEN) based on a prompt-based paradigm, and formulate the task as a question-answering problem. Specifically, we design 5-type templates as instructional prompts, and each template includes a question that acts as the driver to teach UGEN to grasp the paradigm, options that list the candidate intents or slots to reduce the answer search space, and the context denotes original utterance. Through the instructional prompts, UGEN is guided to understand in- tents, slots, and their implicit correlations. On two popular multi-intent benchmark datasets, experimental results demonstrate that UGEN achieves new SOTA performances on full-data and surpasses the baselines by a large margin on 5-shot (28.1%) and 10-shot (23%) scenarios, which verify that UGEN is robust and effective.

Incorporating Instructional Prompts into A Unified Generative Framework for Joint Multiple Intent Detection and Slot Filling

We propose a method to distill language-agnostic meaning embeddings from multilingual sentence encoders for unsupervised quality estimation of machine translation.
Our method facilitates that the meaning embeddings focus on semantics by adversarial training that attempts to eliminate language-specific information.
Experimental results on unsupervised quality estimation reveal that our method achieved higher correlations with human evaluations.

Adversarial Training on Disentangling Meaning and Language Representations for Unsupervised Quality Estimation

Accurate fact veriﬁcation depends on performing ﬁne-grained reasoning over crucial entities by capturing their latent logical relations hidden in multiple evidence clues, which is generally lacking in existing fact veriﬁcation models. In this work, we propose a novel Globalto-Local Aggregation and Fission network (GLAF) to ﬁll this gap. Instead of treating entire sentences or all semantic elements within them as nodes to construct a coarse-grained or unstructured evidence graph as in previous methods, GLAF constructs a ﬁne-grained and structured evidence graph by parsing the rambling sentences into structural triple-level reasoning clues and regarding them as graph nodes to achieve ﬁne-grained and interpretable evidence graph reasoning. Speciﬁcally, to capture latent logical relations between the clues, GLAF ﬁrst employs a local ﬁssion reasoning layer to conduct ﬁne-grained multi-hop reasoning, and then uses a global evidence aggregation layer to achieve information sharing and the interchange of evidence clues for ﬁnal claim label prediction. Experimental results on the FEVER dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of GLAF, showing that it achieves the state-of-the-art performance.

GLAF: Global-to-Local Aggregation and Fission Network for Semantic Level Fact Verification

Continual learning is one of the key components of human learning and a necessary requirement of artificial intelligence. As dialogue can potentially span infinitely many topics and tasks, a task-oriented dialogue system must have the capability to continually learn, dynamically adapting to new challenges while preserving the knowledge it already acquired. Despite the importance, continual reinforcement learning of the dialogue policy has remained largely unaddressed. The lack of a framework with training protocols, baseline models and suitable metrics, has so far hindered research in this direction. In this work we fill precisely this gap, enabling research in dialogue policy optimisation to go from static to dynamic learning. We provide a continual learning algorithm, baseline architectures and metrics for assessing continual learning models. Moreover, we propose the dynamic dialogue policy transformer (DDPT), a novel dynamic architecture that can integrate new knowledge seamlessly, is capable of handling large state spaces and obtains significant zero-shot performance when being exposed to unseen domains, without any growth in network parameter size. We validate the strengths of DDPT in simulation with two user simulators as well as with humans.

Dynamic Dialogue Policy for Continual Reinforcement Learning

SimCSE adopts dropout as data augmentation and encodes an input sentence twice into two corresponding embeddings to build a positive pair. Since SimCSE is a Transformer-based encoder that directly encodes the length information of sentences through positional embeddings, the two embeddings in a positive pair contain the same length information. Thus, a model trained with these positive pairs is biased, tending to consider that sentences of the same or similar length are more similar in semantics. To alleviate it, we apply a simple but effective repetition operation to modify the input sentence. Then we pass the input sentence and its modified counterpart to the pre-trained Transformer encoder, respectively, to get the positive pair. Additionally, we draw inspiration from the computer vision community and introduce momentum contrast to enlarge the number of negative pairs without additional calculations. The proposed modifications are applied to positive and negative pairs separately and build a new sentence embedding method, termed Enhanced SimCSE (ESimCSE). We evaluate the proposed ESimCSE on several benchmark datasets w.r.t the semantic text similarity (STS) task. Experimental results show that ESimCSE outperforms SimCSE by an average Spearman correlation of 2.02\% on BERT-base.

ESimCSE: Enhanced Sample Building Method for Contrastive Learning of Unsupervised Sentence Embedding

Multilingual neural machine translation (NMT) enables positive knowledge transfer among multiple translation tasks with a shared underlying model, but a unified multilingual model usually suffers from capacity bottleneck when tens or hundreds of languages are involved. A possible solution is to cluster languages and train individual model for each cluster. However, the existing clustering methods based on language similarity cannot handle the asymmetric problem in multilingual NMT, i.e., one translation task A can benefit from another translation task B but task B will be harmed by task A. To address this problem, we propose a fuzzy task clustering method for multilingual NMT. Specifically, we employ task affinity, defined as the loss change of one translation task caused by the training of another, as the clustering criterion. Next, we cluster the translation tasks based on the task affinity, such that tasks from the same cluster can benefit each other. For each cluster, we further find out a set of auxiliary translation tasks that benefit the tasks in this cluster. In this way, the model for each cluster is trained not only on the tasks in the cluster but also on the auxiliary tasks. During training, we design a dynamic task sampling strategy that eliminate the negative influence of auxiliary tasks while exploit the positive knowledge of them. We conduct extensive experiments for one-to-many, many-to-one, and many-to-many translation scenarios to verify the effectiveness of our method.

Addressing Asymmetry in Multilingual Neural Machine Translation with Fuzzy Task Clustering

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) has drawn more and more attention because of its extensive applications. However, towards the sentence carried with more than one aspect, most existing works generate an aspect-specific sentence representation for each aspect term to predict sentiment polarity, which neglects the sentiment relationship among aspect terms. Besides, most current ABSA methods focus on sentences containing only one aspect term or multiple aspect terms with the same sentiment polarity, which makes ABSA degenerate into sentence-level sentiment analysis. In this paper, to deal with this problem, we construct a heterogeneous graph to model inter-aspect relationships and aspect-context relationships simultaneously and propose a novel Composition-based Heterogeneous Graph Multi-channel Attention Network (CHGMAN) to encode the constructed heterogeneous graph. Meanwhile, we conduct extensive experiments on three datasets: MAMS-ATSA, Rest14, and Laptop14, experimental results show the effectiveness of our method.

Composition-based Heterogeneous Graph Multi-channel Attention Network for Multi-aspect Multi-sentiment Classification

Task-oriented dialog (TOD) systems often require interaction with an external knowledge base to retrieve necessary entity (e.g., restaurant) information to support the response generation. Most current end-to-end TOD systems either retrieve the KB information explicitly or embed it into model parameters for implicit access.~While the former approach demands scanning the KB at each turn of response generation, which is inefficient when the KB scales up, the latter approach shows higher flexibility and efficiency. In either approach, the systems may generate a response with conflicting entity information. To address this issue, we propose to generate the entity autoregressively first and leverage it to guide the response generation in an end-to-end system. To ensure entity consistency, we impose a trie constraint on entity generation. We also introduce a logit concatenation strategy to facilitate gradient backpropagation for end-to-end training. Experiments on MultiWOZ 2.1 single and CAMREST show that our system can generate more high-quality and entity-consistent responses.

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Improving Commonsense Contingent Reasoning by Pseudo-data and its Application to the Related Tasks

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