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In many domains, dialogue systems need to work collaboratively with users to successfully reconstruct the meaning the user had in mind. In this paper, we show how cognitive models of users&#39; communicative strategies can be leveraged in a reinforcement learning approach to dialogue planning to enable interactive systems to give targeted, effective feedback about the system&#39;s understanding. We describe a prototype system that collaborates on reference tasks that distinguish arbitrarily varying color patches from similar distractors, and use experiments with crowd workers and analyses of our learned policies to document that our approach leads to context-sensitive clarification strategies that focus on key missing information, elicit correct answers that the system understands, and contribute to increasing dialogue success.

COLING 2020

Combining Cognitive Modeling and Reinforcement Learning for Clarification in Dialogue

cognitive modelling and dialogue architectures

clarifications in dialogue

reinforcement learning in dialogue

dialogue agents

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.

In many domains, dialogue systems need to work collaboratively with users to successfully reconstruct the meaning the user had in mind. In this paper, we show how cognitive models of users' communicative strategies can be leveraged in a reinforcement learning approach to dialogue planning to enable interactive systems to give targeted, effective feedback about the system's understanding. We describe a prototype system that collaborates on reference tasks that distinguish arbitrarily varying color patches from similar distractors, and use experiments with crowd workers and analyses of our learned policies to document that our approach leads to context-sensitive clarification strategies that focus on key missing information, elicit correct answers that the system understands, and contribute to increasing dialogue success.

technical paper

While lexico-semantic elements no doubt capture a large amount of linguistic information, it has been argued that they do not capture all information contained in text. This assumption is central to constructionist approaches to language which argue that language consists of constructions, learned pairings of a form and a function or meaning that are either frequent or have a meaning that cannot be predicted from its component parts. BERT’s training objectives give it access to a tremendous amount of lexico-semantic information, and while BERTology has shown that BERT captures certain important linguistic dimensions, there have been no studies exploring the extent to which BERT might have access to constructional information. In this work we design several probes and conduct extensive experiments to answer this question. Our results allow us to conclude that BERT does indeed have access to a significant amount of information, much of which linguists typically call constructional information. The impact of this observation is potentially far-reaching as it provides insights into what deep learning methods learn from text, while also showing that information contained in constructions is redundantly encoded in lexico-semantics.

CxGBERT: BERT meets Construction Grammar

We propose a novel transcription workflow which combines spoken term detection and humanin-the-loop, together with a pilot experiment. This work is grounded in an almost zero-resource scenario where only a few terms have so far been identified, involving two endangered languages. We show that in the early stages of transcription, when the available data is insufficient to train a robust ASR system, it is possible to take advantage of the transcription of a small number of isolated words in order to bootstrap the transcription of a speech collection.

Enabling Interactive Transcription in an Indigenous Community

Morphological inflection, like many sequence-to-sequence tasks, sees great performance from recurrent neural architectures when data is plentiful, but performance falls off sharply in lower-data settings. We investigate one aspect of 
neural seq2seq models that we hypothesize contributes to overfitting - teacher forcing. By creating different training and test conditions, exposure bias increases the likelihood that a system too closely models its training data. Experiments show that teacher-forced models struggle to recover when they enter unknown territory. However, a simple modification to the training algorithm to more closely mimic test conditions creates models that are better able to generalize to unseen 
environments.

Noise Isn't Always Negative: Countering Exposure Bias in Sequence-to-Sequence Inflection Models

Sentiment forecasting in dialog aims to predict the polarity of next utterance to come, and can help speakers revise their utterances in sentimental utterances generation. However, the polarity of next utterance is normally hard to predict, due to the lack of content of next utterance (yet to come). In this study, we propose a Neural Sentiment Forecasting (NSF) model to address inherent challenges. In particular, we employ a neural simulation model to simulate the next utterance based on the context (previous utterances encountered). Moreover, we employ a sequence influence model to learn both pair-wise and seq-wise influence. Empirical studies illustrate the importance of proposed sentiment forecasting task, and justify the effectiveness of our NSF model over several strong baselines. 


Sentiment Forecasting in Dialog

Through the progress made in a sentence-level neural machine translation (NMT), a context- aware NMT has been rapidly developed to exploit previous sentences as context. Recent work in the context-aware NMT incorporates source- or target-side contexts. In contrast to the source- side context, the target-side context causes a gap between training that utilizes a ground truth sentence and inference using a machine-translated sentence as context. This gap leads to transla- tion quality deteriorating because the translation model is trained with only the ground truth data that cannot be used in the inference. In this paper, we propose sampling both the ground truth and the machine-translated previous sentences of the target-side for the context-aware NMT. The proposed method can make the translation model robust against mistakes and biases made at the inference. Models using our proposed approach show improvements over models using the previous approaches in English ↔ Japanese and English ↔ German translation tasks.

Effective Use of Target-side Context for Neural Machine Translation

From the perspective of health psychology, human beings with long-term and sustained negativity are highly probable to be diagnosed with depression. Inspired by this, we argue that the global topic information derived from user-generated contents (e.g., texts and images) is crucial to boost the performance of the depression detection task, though this information has been neglected by
almost all previous studies on depression detection. To this end, we propose a new Multimodal Topic-enriched Auxiliary Learning (MTAL) approach, aiming at capturing the topic information inside different modalities (i.e., texts and images) for depression detection. Especially, in our approach, a modality-agnostic topic model is proposed to be capable of mining the topical clues from either the discrete textual signals or the continuous visual signals. On this basis, the topic modeling w.r.t. the two modalities are cast as two auxiliary tasks for improving the performance
of the primary task (i.e., depression detection). Finally, the detailed evaluation demonstrates the great advantage of our MTAL approach to depression detection over the state-of-the-art baselines. This justifies the importance of the multimodal topic information to depression detection and the effectiveness of our approach in capturing such information.

Multimodal Topic-Enriched Auxiliary Learning for 
Depression Detection


Recent question generation (QG) approaches often utilize the sequence-to-sequence framework (Seq2Seq) to optimize the log-likelihood of ground-truth questions using teacher forcing. However, this training objective is inconsistent with actual question quality, which is often reflected by certain global properties such as whether the question can be answered by the document. As such, we directly optimize for QG-specific objectives via reinforcement learning to improve question quality. We design three different rewards that target to improve the fluency, relevance, and answerability of generated questions. We conduct both automatic and human evaluations in addition to a thorough analysis to explore the effect of each QG-specific reward. We find that optimizing question-specific rewards generally leads to better performance in automatic evaluation metrics. However, only the rewards that correlate well with human judgment (e.g., relevance) lead to real improvement in question quality. Optimizing for the others, especially answerability, introduces incorrect bias to the model, resulting in poor question quality. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/YuxiXie/RL-for-Question-Generation.

Exploring Question-Specific Rewards for Generating Deep Questions

Text generative models (TGMs) excel in producing text that matches the style of human language reasonably well. Such TGMs can be misused by adversaries, e.g., by automatically generating fake news and fake product reviews that can look authentic and fool humans. Detectors that can distinguish text generated by TGM from human written text play a vital role in mitigating such misuse of TGMs. Recently, there has been a flurry of works from both natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) communities to build accurate detectors for English. Despite the importance of this problem, there is currently no work that surveys this fast-growing literature and introduces newcomers to important research challenges. In this work, we fill this void by providing a critical survey and review of this literature to facilitate a comprehensive understanding of this problem. We conduct an in-depth error analysis of the state-of-the-art detector and discuss research directions to guide future work in this exciting area.

Automatic Detection of Machine Generated Text: A Critical Survey

Relation extraction (RE) has been extensively studied due to its importance in real-world applications such as knowledge base construction and question answering. Most of the existing works train the models on either distantly supervised data or human-annotated data. To take advantage of the high accuracy of human annotation and the cheap cost of distant supervision, we propose the dual supervision framework which effectively utilizes both types of data. However, simply combining the two types of data to train a RE model may decrease the prediction accuracy since distant supervision has labeling bias. We employ two separate prediction networks HA-Net and DS-Net to predict the labels by human annotation and distant supervision, respectively, to prevent the degradation of accuracy by the incorrect labeling of distant supervision. Furthermore, we propose an additional loss term called disagreement penalty to enable HA-Net to learn from distantly supervised labels. In addition, we exploit additional networks to adaptively assess the labeling bias by considering contextual information. Our performance study on sentence-level and document-level REs confirms the effectiveness of the dual supervision framework.

Dual Supervision Framework for Relation Extraction with Distant Supervision and Human Annotation

The paper introduces two Russian machine reading comprehension (MRC) datasets, calledMuSeRC and RuCoS, which require reasoning over multiple sentences and commonsense knowledge to infer the answer. The former follows the design of MultiRC, while the latter is a counterpart of the ReCoRD dataset. The datasets are included in RussianSuperGLUE, the Russian general language understanding benchmark. We provide a comparative analysis and demonstrate that the proposed tasks are relatively more complex as compared to the original ones for English.Besides, performance results of human solvers and BERT-based models show that MuSeRC and RuCoS represent a challenge for recent advanced neural models. We thus hope to facilitate research in the field of MRC for Russian and prompt the study of multi-hop reasoning in across-lingual scenario.

Combining Cognitive Modeling and Reinforcement Learning for Clarification in Dialogue

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