United Arab Emirates

This paper presents a new natural language processing task - Actionable Entities Recognition (AER) - recognition of entities that protagonists could interact with for further plot development. Though similar to classical Named Entity Recognition (NER), it has profound differences. In particular, it is crucial for interactive fiction, where the agent needs to detect entities that might be useful in the future. We also discuss if AER  might be further useful for the systems dealing with narrative processing since actionable entities profoundly impact the causal relationship in a story. We validate the proposed task on two previously available datasets and present a new benchmark dataset for the AER task that includes 5550 descriptions with one or more actionable entities. 

EMNLP 2022

AERBIF: Actionable Entities Recognition Benchmark for Interactive Fiction

plot

actionable entities

narrative

interactive

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

AAAI 2021

workshop paper

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Task planning is an important component of traditional robotics systems enabling robots to compose fine grained skills to perform more complex tasks. Recent work building systems for translating natural language to executable actions for task completion in simulated embodied agents is focused on directly predicting low level action sequences that would be expected to be directly executable by a physical robot. In this work, we instead focus on predicting a higher level plan representation for one such embodied task completion dataset - TEACh, under the assumption that techniques for high-level plan prediction from natural language are expected to be more transferable to physical robot systems . We demonstrate that better plans can be predicted using multimodal context, and that plan prediction and plan execution modules are likely dependent on each other and hence it may not be ideal to fully decouple them. Further, we benchmark execution of oracle plans to quantify the scope for improvement in plan prediction models.

Multimodal Contextualized Plan Prediction for Embodied Task Completion

We design and evaluate a Thompson sampling-based interactive Bayesian optimization algorithm that leverages a Gaussian process reward model of the Masked Language Model (MLM) pre-training objective, for its sequential minimization. Transformer-based language model (TLM) pre-training requires large volumes of data and high computational resources, while introducing many unresolved design choices, such as hyperparameter selection of the pre-training procedure. We here fit TLM pre-training validation losses with a Gaussian process, and formulate a Thompson sampling bandit policy that maximizes its sequentially attained cumulative rewards. Instead of MLM pre-training with fixed masking probabilities, the proposed Gaussian process-based Thompson sampling (GP-TS) accelerates and improves MLM pre-training performance by sequentially selecting masking hyperparameters of the language model. GP-TS provides an interactive, efficient framework for pre-training TLMs, as it attains better MLM pre-training loss in less epochs, avoiding costly hyperparameter selection techniques.

Thompson sampling for interactive Bayesian optimization of dynamic masking-based language model pre-training

Recently, there has been an increasing inter- est in two-pass streaming end-to-end speech recognition (ASR) that incorporates a 2nd-pass rescoring model on top of the conventional 1st- pass streaming ASR model to improve recogni- tion accuracy while keeping latency low. One of the latest 2nd-pass rescoring model, Trans- former Rescorer, takes the n-best initial out- puts and audio embeddings from the 1st-pass model, and then choose the best output by re- scoring the n-best initial outputs. However, training this Transformer Rescorer requires ex- pensive paired audio-text training data because the model uses audio embeddings as input. In this work, we present our Joint Audio/Text training method for Transformer Rescorer, to leverage unpaired text-only data which is rela- tively cheaper than paired audio-text data. We evaluate Transformer Rescorer with our Joint Audio/Text training on Librispeech dataset as well as our large-scale in-house dataset and show that our training method can improve word error rate (WER) significantly compared to standard Transformer Rescorer without re- quiring any extra model parameters or latency.

Joint Audio/Text Training for Transformer Rescorer of Streaming Speech Recognition

Text games present opportunities for natural language understanding (NLU) methods to tackle reinforcement learning (RL) challenges. However, recent work has questioned the necessity of NLU by showing random text hashes could perform decently. In this paper, we pursue a fine-grained investigation into the roles of text in the face of different RL challenges, and reconcile that semantic and non-semantic language representations could be complementary rather than contrasting. Concretely, we propose a simple scheme to extract relevant contextual information into an approximate state hash as extra input for an RNN-based text agent. Such a lightweight plug-in achieves competitive performance with state-of-the-art text agents using advanced NLU techniques such as knowledge graph and passage retrieval, suggesting non-NLU methods might suffice to tackle the challenge of partial observability. However, if we remove RNN encoders and use approximate or even ground-truth state hash alone, the model performs miserably, which confirms the importance of semantic function approximation to tackle the challenge of combinatorially large observation and action spaces. Our findings and analysis provide new insights for designing better text game task setups and agents.

Revisiting the Roles of "Text” in Text Games

Understanding rich narratives, such as dialogues and stories, often requires natural language processing systems to access relevant knowledge from commonsense knowledge graphs. However, these systems typically retrieve facts from KGs using simple heuristics that disregard the complex challenges of identifying situationally-relevant commonsense knowledge (e.g., contextualization, implicitness, ambiguity). In this work, we propose the new task of commonsense fact linking, where models are given contexts and trained to identify situationally-relevant commonsense knowledge from KGs. Our novel benchmark, ComFact, contains ~293k in-context relevance annotations for commonsense triplets across four stylistically diverse dialogue and storytelling datasets. Experimental results confirm that heuristic fact linking approaches are imprecise knowledge extractors. Learned fact linking models demonstrate across-the-board performance improvements (~34.6% F1) over these heuristics. Furthermore, improved knowledge retrieval yielded average downstream improvements of 9.8% for a dialogue response generation task. However, fact linking models still significantly underperform humans, suggesting our benchmark is a promising testbed for research in commonsense augmentation of NLP systems.

ComFact: A Benchmark for Linking Contextual Commonsense Knowledge

Language-based environment manipulation requires agents to manipulate the environment following natural language instructions, which is challenging due to the huge space of the environments. To address this challenge, various approaches have been proposed in recent work. Although these approaches work well for their intended environments, they are difficult to generalize across environments. In this work, we propose LEMON, a general framework for language-based environment manipulation tasks. Specifically, we first specify a general approach for language-based environment manipulation tasks, which can deal with various environments using the same generative language model. Then we propose an execution-guided pre-training strategy to inject prior knowledge of environments to the language model with a pure synthetic pre-training corpus. Experimental results on tasks including Alchemy, Scene, Tangrams, ProPara and Recipes demonstrate the effectiveness of LEMON: it achieves new state-of-the-art results on four of the tasks, and the execution-guided pre-training strategy brings remarkable improvements on all experimental tasks.

LEMON: Language-Based Environment Manipulation via Execution-Guided Pre-training

Language models pre-trained on large self-supervised corpora, followed by task-specific fine-tuning has become the dominant paradigm in NLP. These pre-training datasets often have a one-to-many structure---e.g. in dialogue there are many valid responses for a given context. However, only some of these responses will be desirable in our downstream task.  This raises the question of how we should train the model such that it can emulate the desirable behaviours, but not the undesirable ones. Current approaches train in a one-to-one setup---only a single target response is given for a single dialogue context---leading to models only learning to predict the average response, while ignoring the full range of possible responses. Using text-based games as a testbed, our approach, PASA, uses discrete latent variables to capture the range of different behaviours represented in our larger pre-training dataset. We then use knowledge distillation to distil the posterior probability distribution into a student model. This probability distribution is far richer than learning from only the hard targets of the dataset, and thus allows the student model to benefit from the richer range of actions the teacher model has learned. Results show up to 49\% empirical improvement over the previous state-of-the-art model on the Jericho Walkthroughs dataset.

Learn What Is Possible, Then Choose What Is Best: Disentangling One-To-Many Relations in Language Through Text-based Games

Large language models can produce fluent dialogue but often hallucinate factual inaccuracies. While retrieval-augmented models help alleviate this issue, they still face a difficult challenge of both reasoning to provide correct knowledge and generating conversation simultaneously. In this work, we propose a modular model, Knowledge to Response (K2R), for incorporating knowledge into conversational agents, which breaks down this problem into two easier steps. K2R first generates a knowledge sequence, given a dialogue context, as an intermediate step. After this "reasoning step", the model then attends to its own generated knowledge sequence, as well as the dialogue context, to produce a final response. In detailed experiments, we find that such a model hallucinates less in knowledge-grounded dialogue tasks,  and has advantages in terms of interpretability and modularity. In particular, it can be used to fuse QA and dialogue systems together to enable dialogue agents to give knowledgeable answers, or QA models to give conversational responses in a zero-shot setting.

Reason first, then respond: Modular Generation for Knowledge-infused Dialogue

Supervised training of existing deep learning models for sequence labeling relies on large scale labeled datasets. Such datasets are generally created with crowd-source labeling. However, crowd-source labeling for tasks of sequence labeling can be expensive and time-consuming. Further, crowd-source labeling by external annotators may not be appropriate for data that contains user private information. Considering the above limitations of crowd-source labeling, we study interactive sequence labeling that allows training directly with the user feedback, which alleviates the annotation cost and maintains the user privacy. We identify two bias, namely, context bias and feedback bias, by formulating interactive sequence labeling via a Structural Causal Model (SCM). To alleviate the context and feedback bias based on the SCM, we identify the frequent context tokens as confounders in the backdoor adjustment and further propose an entropy-based modulation that is inspired by information theory. entities more sample-efficiently. With extensive experiments, we validate that our approach can effectively alleviate the biases and our models can be efficiently learnt  with the user feedback.

Context-aware Information-theoretic Causal De-biasing for Interactive Sequence Labeling

This paper proposes StuBot, a text-based conversational agent that provides adaptive feedback for learning by teaching. StuBot first asks the users to teach the learning content by summarizing and explaining it in their own words. After the users inputted the explanation text for teaching, StuBot uses a machine reading comprehension (MRC) engine to provide adaptive feedback with further questions about the insufficient parts of the explanation text. We conducted a within-subject study to evaluate the effectiveness of adaptive feedback by StuBot. Both the quantitative and qualitative results showed that learning by teaching with adaptive feedback can improve learning performance, immersion, and overall experience.

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Multimodal Contextualized Plan Prediction for Embodied Task Completion

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