United Arab Emirates

Recent research on argumentative dialogues has focused on persuading people to take some action, changing their stance on the topic of discussion, or winning debates. In this work, we focus on argumentative dialogues that aim to open up (rather than change) people&#39;s minds to help them become more understanding to views that are unfamiliar or in opposition to their own convictions. To this end, we present a dataset of $183$ argumentative dialogues about $3$ controversial topics: veganism, Brexit and COVID-19 vaccination. The dialogues were collected using the Wizard of Oz approach, where wizards leverage a knowledge-base of arguments to converse with participants. Open-mindedness is measured before and after engaging in the dialogue using a questionnaire from the psychology literature, and success of the dialogue is measured as the change in the participant&#39;s stance towards those who hold opinions different to theirs. We evaluate two dialogue models: a Wikipedia-based and an argument-based model. We show that while both models perform closely in terms of opening up minds, the argument-based model is significantly better on other dialogue properties such as engagement and clarity.

EMNLP 2022

Opening up Minds with Argumentative Dialogues

open-minded

dialogue generation

dialogue systems

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ACL 2024

The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

Recent research on argumentative dialogues has focused on persuading people to take some action, changing their stance on the topic of discussion, or winning debates. In this work, we focus on argumentative dialogues that aim to open up (rather than change) people's minds to help them become more understanding to views that are unfamiliar or in opposition to their own convictions. To this end, we present a dataset of $183$ argumentative dialogues about $3$ controversial topics: veganism, Brexit and COVID-19 vaccination. The dialogues were collected using the Wizard of Oz approach, where wizards leverage a knowledge-base of arguments to converse with participants. Open-mindedness is measured before and after engaging in the dialogue using a questionnaire from the psychology literature, and success of the dialogue is measured as the change in the participant's stance towards those who hold opinions different to theirs. We evaluate two dialogue models: a Wikipedia-based and an argument-based model. We show that while both models perform closely in terms of opening up minds, the argument-based model is significantly better on other dialogue properties such as engagement and clarity.

findings / work in progress

## Welcome to EMNLP 2022!
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Welcome!
EMNLP 2022 will take place in Abu Dhabi from December 7th to December 11th, 2022. And it will be held in hybrid mode, both online and offline.

Many word-level adversarial attack approaches for textual data have been proposed in recent studies. However, due to the massive search space consisting of combinations of candidate words, the existing approaches face the problem of preserving the semantics of texts when crafting adversarial counterparts. In this paper, we develop a novel attack strategy to find adversarial texts with high similarity to the original texts while introducing minimal perturbation. The rationale is that we expect the adversarial texts with small perturbation can better preserve the semantic meaning of original texts. Experiments show that, compared with state-of-the-art attack approaches, our approach achieves higher success rates and lower perturbation rates in four benchmark datasets.

Generating Textual Adversaries with Minimal Perturbation

Adding interpretability to word embeddings represents an area of active research in text
representation. Recent work has explored the potential of embedding words via so-called polar
dimensions (e.g. good vs. bad, correct vs. wrong). Examples of such recent approaches
include SemAxis, POLAR, FrameAxis, and BiImp. Although these approaches provide interpretable
dimensions for words, they have not been designed to deal with polysemy, i.e. they can not easily distinguish between different senses of words. To address this limitation, we present SensePOLAR, an extension of the original POLAR framework that enables wordsense aware interpretability for pre-trained contextual word embeddings. The resulting interpretable word embeddings achieve a level of
performance that is comparable to original contextual word embeddings across a variety of
natural language processing tasks including the GLUE and SQuAD benchmarks. Our work
removes a fundamental limitation of existing approaches by offering users sense aware interpretations
for contextual word embeddings.

SensePOLAR: Word sense aware interpretability for pre-trained contextual word embeddings

Empathy, which is widely used in psychological counseling, is a key trait of everyday human conversations. Equipped with commonsense knowledge, current approaches to empathetic response generation focus on capturing implicit emotion within dialogue context, where the emotions are treated as a static variable throughout the conversations. However, emotions change dynamically between utterances, which makes previous works difficult to perceive the emotion flow and predict the correct emotion of the target response, leading to inappropriate response. Furthermore, simply importing commonsense knowledge without harmonization may trigger the conflicts between knowledge and emotion, which confuse the model to choose the correct information to guide the generation process. To address the above problems, we propose a Serial Encoding and Emotion-Knowledge interaction (SEEK) method for empathetic dialogue generation. We use a fine-grained encoding strategy which is more sensitive to the emotion dynamics (emotion flow) in the conversations to predict the emotion-intent characteristic of response. Besides, we design a novel framework to model the interaction between knowledge and emotion to solve the conflicts generate more sensible response. Extensive experiments on the utterance-level annotated EMPATHETICDIALOGUES demonstrate that SEEK outperforms the strong baseline in both automatic and manual evaluations.

Empathetic Dialogue Generation via Sensitive Emotion Recognition and Sensible Knowledge Selection

This paper describes a framework to automatically generate a spoken question answering (QA) dataset. The framework consists of a question generation (QG) module to generate questions automatically from given text documents, a text-to-speech (TTS) module to convert the text documents into spoken form and an automatic speech recognition (ASR) module to transcribe the spoken content. The final dataset contains question-answer pairs for both the reference text and ASR transcriptions as well as the audio files corresponding to each reference text. For QG and ASR systems we used pre-trained multilingual encoder-decoder transformer models and fine-tuned these models using a limited amount of manually generated QA data and TTS-based speech data, respectively. As a proof of concept, we investigated the proposed framework for Turkish and generated the Turkish Question Answering (TurQuAse) dataset using Wikipedia articles. Manual evaluation of the automatically generated question- answer pairs and QA performance evaluation with state of-the-art models on TurQuAse show that the proposed framework is efficient for automatically generating spoken QA datasets. To the best of our knowledge, TurQuAse is the first publicly available spoken question answering dataset for Turkish. The proposed framework can be easily extended to other languages where a limited amount of QA data is available.

A Framework for Automatic Generation of Spoken Question-Answering Data

For vision-and-language reasoning tasks, both fully connectionist, end-to-end methods and hybrid, neuro-symbolic methods have achieved high in-distribution performance. In which out-of-distribution settings does each paradigm excel? We investigate this question on both single-image and multi-image visual question-answering through four types of generalization tests: a novel segment-combine test for multi-image queries, contrast set, compositional generalization, and cross-benchmark transfer.
Vision-and-language end-to-end trained systems exhibit sizeable performance drops across all these tests. Neuro-symbolic methods suffer even more on cross-benchmark transfer from GQA to VQA, but they show smaller accuracy drops on the other generalization tests and their performance quickly improves by few-shot training. Overall, our results demonstrate the complementary benefits of these two paradigms, and emphasize the importance of using a diverse suite of generalization tests to fully characterize model robustness to distribution shift.

Generalization Differences between End-to-End and Neuro-Symbolic Vision-Language Reasoning Systems

Deidentification seeks to anonymize textual data prior to distribution. Automatic deidentification primarily uses supervised named entity recognition from human-labeled data points. We propose an unsupervised deidentification method that masks words that leak personally-identifying information. The approach utilizes a specially trained reidentification model to identify individuals from redacted personal documents. Motivated by K-anonymity based privacy, we generate redactions that ensure a minimum reidentification rank for the correct profile of the document. To evaluate this approach, we consider the task of deidentifying Wikipedia Biographies, and evaluate using an adversarial reidentification metric. Compared to a set of unsupervised baselines, our approach deidentifies documents more completely while removing fewer words. Qualitatively, we see that the approach eliminates many identifying aspects that would fall outside of the common named entity based approach.

Unsupervised Text Deidentification

In this work, we combine the two paradigms: Federated Learning (FL) and Continual Learning (CL) for text classification task in cloud-edge continuum. The objective of Federated Continual Learning (FCL) is to improve deep learning models over life time at each client by (relevant and efficient) knowledge transfer without sharing data. Here, we address challenges in minimizing inter-client interference while knowledge sharing due to heterogeneous tasks across clients in FCL setup. In doing so, we propose a novel framework, Federated Selective Inter-client Transfer (FedSeIT) which selectively combines model parameters of foreign clients. To further maximize knowledge transfer, we assess domain overlap and select informative tasks from the sequence of historical tasks at each foreign client while preserving privacy. Evaluating against the baselines, we show improved performance, a gain of (average) 12.4% in text classification over a sequence of tasks using five datasets from diverse domains. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that applies FCL to NLP.

Federated Continual Learning for Text Classification via Selective Inter-client Transfer

In the real world, autonomous driving agents navigate in highly dynamic environments full of unexpected situations where pre-trained models are unreliable. In these situations, what is immediately available to vehicles is often only human operators. Empowering autonomous driving agents with the ability to navigate in a continuous and dynamic environment and to communicate with humans through sensorimotor-grounded dialogue becomes critical. To this end, we introduce Dialogue On the ROad To Handle Irregular Events (DOROTHIE), a novel interactive simulation platform that enables the creation of unexpected situations on the fly to support empirical studies on situated communication with autonomous driving agents. Based on this platform, we created the Situated Dialogue Navigation (SDN), a navigation benchmark of 183 trials with a total of 8415 utterances, around 18.7 hours of control streams, and 2.9 hours of trimmed audio. SDN is developed to evaluate the agent's ability to predict dialogue moves from humans as well as generate its own dialogue moves and physical navigation actions. We further developed a transformer-based baseline model for these SDN tasks. Our empirical results indicate that language guided-navigation in a highly dynamic environment is an extremely difficult task for end-to-end models. These results will provide insight towards future work on robust autonomous driving agents

DOROTHIE: Spoken Dialogue for Handling Unexpected Situations in Interactive Autonomous Driving Agents

In settings from fact-checking to question answering, we frequently want to know whether a collection of evidence (premises) entails a hypothesis. Existing methods primarily focus on the end-to-end discriminative version of this task, but less work has treated the generative version in which a model searches over the space of statements entailed by the premises to constructively derive the hypothesis. We propose a system for doing this kind of deductive reasoning in natural language by decomposing the task into separate steps coordinated by a search procedure, producing a tree of intermediate conclusions that faithfully reflects the system's reasoning process. Our experiments on the EntailmentBank dataset (Dalvi et al., 2021) demonstrate that the proposed system can successfully prove true statements while rejecting false ones. Moreover, it produces natural language explanations with a 17% absolute higher step validity than those produced by an end-to-end T5 model.

Natural Language Deduction through Search over Statement Compositions

Model compression by way of parameter pruning, quantization, or distillation has recently gained popularity as an approach for reducing the computational requirements of modern deep neural network models for NLP. Inspired by prior works suggesting a connection between simpler, more generalizable models and those that lie within wider loss basins, we hypothesize that optimizing for flat minima should lead to simpler parameterizations and thus more compressible models. We propose to combine sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) with various task-specific model compression methods, including iterative magnitude pruning (IMP), structured pruning with a distillation objective, and post-training dynamic quantization. Empirically, we show that optimizing for flatter minima consistently leads to greater compressibility of parameters compared to vanilla Adam when fine-tuning BERT models, with little to no loss in accuracy on the GLUE text classification and SQuAD question answering benchmarks. Moreover, SAM finds superior winning tickets during IMP that 1) are amenable to vanilla Adam optimization, and 2) transfer more effectively across tasks.

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