Singapore

Dialogue state error correction has recently been proposed to correct wrong slot values in predicted dialogue states, thereby mitigating the error propagation problem for dialogue state tracking (DST). These approaches, though effective, are heavily intertwined with specific DST models, limiting their applicability to other DST models. To solve this problem, we propose Scalable Dialogue State Correction (Scalable-DSC), which can correct wrong slot values in the dialogue state predicted by any DST model. Specifically, we propose a Structural Template Prompt (STP) that converts predicted dialogue state from any DST models into a standardized natural language sequence as a part of the historical context, associates them with dialogue history information, and generates a corrected dialogue state sequence based on predefined template options. We further enhance Scalable-DSC by introducing two training strategies. The first employs a predictive state simulator to simulate the predicted dialogue states as the training data to enhance the generalization ability of the model. The second involves using the dialogue state predicted by DST as the training data, aiming at mitigating the inconsistent error type distribution between the training and inference. Experiments confirm that our model achieves state-of-the-art results on MultiWOZ 2.0-2.4.

EMNLP 2023

Scalable-DSC: A Structural Template Prompt Approach to Scalable Dialogue State Correction | VIDEO

dialogue state correction

error propagation

dialogue state tracking

poster

**Welcome to EMNLP 2023!**

On behalf of the EMNLP 2023 Organizing Committee, I extend a warm and heartfelt welcome to all of you to the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). It is with immense pleasure and excitement that we gather here in Singapore, a vibrant hub of innovation and technological advancement.

The conference program is packed with insightful presentations, thought-provoking workshops, and engaging networking opportunities. In addition to the technical sessions, we have also planned several social events that will provide you with the opportunity to connect with your colleagues.

The conference is held in person at the Resorts World Convention Centre in Singapore, and available on-line with the help of Underline.

For those in Singapore, I hope that you will find time to explore the exciting Sentosa Island, Gardens by the Bay, Singapore Botanic Gardens and the many other attractions unique to Singapore.

Of course, we are grateful to our sponsors and partners for their generous support of EMNLP 2023, whose contributions make it possible for us to host this world-class event.

Yuji Matsumoto (RIKEN AIP) 
EMNLP 2023 General Chair

To access the **EMNLP 2023** event page on Underline, you need to register for the Conference. 
Please follow **[this link](https://2023.emnlp.org/registration/)** for more details.

EMNLP 2023 took place in Singapore from Dec 6th to Dec 10th, 2023.

Dialogue segmentation is a crucial task for dialogue systems allowing a better understanding of conversational texts. Despite recent progress in unsupervised dialogue segmentation methods, their performances are limited by the lack of explicit supervised signals for training. Furthermore, the precise definition of segmentation points in conversations still remains as a challenging problem, increasing the difficulty of collecting manual annotations. In this paper, we provide a feasible definition of dialogue segmentation points with the help of document-grounded dialogues and release a large-scale supervised dataset called SuperDialseg, containing 9,478 dialogues based on two prevalent document-grounded dialogue corpora, and also inherit their useful dialogue-related annotations. Moreover, we provide a benchmark including 18 models across five categories for the dialogue segmentation task with several proper evaluation metrics. Empirical studies show that supervised learning is extremely effective in in-domain datasets and models trained on SuperDialseg can achieve good generalization ability on out-of-domain data. Additionally, we also conducted human verification on the test set and the Kappa score confirmed the quality of our automatically constructed dataset. We believe our work is an important step forward in the field of dialogue segmentation.

SuperDialseg: A Large-scale Dataset for Supervised Dialogue Segmentation

Large language models (LLMs) have recently reached an impressive level of linguistic capability, prompting comparisons with human language skills. However, there have been relatively few systematic inquiries into the linguistic capabilities of the latest generation of LLMs, and those studies that do exist (i) ignore the remarkable ability of humans to generalize, (ii) focus only on English, and (iii) investigate syntax or semantics and overlook other capabilities that lie at the heart of human language, like morphology. Here, we close these gaps by conducting the first rigorous analysis of the morphological capabilities of ChatGPT in four typologically varied languages (specifically, English, German, Tamil, and Turkish). We apply a version of Berko's (1958) wug test to ChatGPT, using novel, uncontaminated datasets for the four examined languages. We find that ChatGPT massively underperforms purpose-built systems, particularly in English. Overall, our results---through the lens of morphology---cast a new light on the linguistic capabilities of ChatGPT, suggesting that claims of human-like language skills are premature and misleading.

Counting the Bugs in ChatGPT’s Wugs: A Multilingual Investigation into the Morphological Capabilities of a Large Language Model

Despite being the world's fourth-most populous country, the development of spoken language technologies in Indonesia still needs improvement. Most automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems that have been developed are still limited to transcribing the exact word-by-word, which, in many cases, consists of ambiguous sentences. In fact, speakers use prosodic characteristics of speech to convey different interpretations, which, unfortunately, these systems often ignore. In this study, we attempt to resolve structurally ambiguous utterances into unambiguous texts in Indonesian using prosodic information. To the best of our knowledge, this might be the first study to address this problem in the ASR context. Our contributions include (1) collecting the Indonesian speech corpus on structurally ambiguous sentences\footnote{Our corpus is available at \url{https://github.com/ha3ci-lab/struct_amb_ind}}; (2) conducting a survey on how people disambiguate structurally ambiguous sentences presented in both text and speech forms; and (3) constructing an Indonesian ASR and meaning interpretation system by utilizing both cascade and direct approaches to map speech to text, along with two additional prosodic information signals (pause and pitch). The experimental results reveal that it is possible to disambiguate these utterances. In this study, the proposed cascade system, utilizing Mel-spectrograms concatenated with F0 and energy as input, achieved a disambiguation accuracy of 79.6\%, while the proposed direct system with the same input yielded an even more impressive disambiguation accuracy of 82.2\%.

Speech Recognition and Meaning Interpretation: Towards Disambiguation of Structurally Ambiguous Spoken Utterances in Indonesian | VIDEO

Human-like chatbots necessitate the use of commonsense reasoning in order to effectively comprehend and respond to implicit information present within conversations. Achieving such coherence and informativeness in responses, however, is a non-trivial task. Even for large language models (LLMs), the task of identifying and aggregating key evidence within a single hop presents a substantial challenge. This complexity arises because such evidence is scattered across multiple turns in a conversation, thus necessitating integration over multiple hops. Hence, our focus is to facilitate such multi-hop reasoning over a dialogue context, namely dialogue chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. 
To this end, we propose a knowledge distillation framework that leverages LLMs as unreliable teachers and selectively distills consistent and helpful rationales via alignment filters. 
We further present DOCTOR, a DialOgue Chain-of-ThOught Reasoner that provides reliable CoT rationales for response generation. 
We conduct extensive experiments to show that enhancing dialogue agents with high-quality rationales from DOCTOR significantly improves the quality of their responses.

Dialogue Chain-of-Thought Distillation for Commonsense-aware Conversational Agents | VIDEO

An end-to-end speech-to-text (S2T) translation model is usually initialized from a pre-trained speech recognition encoder and a pre-trained text-to-text (T2T) translation decoder.
Although this straightforward setting has been shown empirically successful, there do not exist clear answers to the research questions: 1) how are speech and text modalities fused in S2T model and 2) how to better fuse the two modalities?
In this paper, we take the first step toward understanding the fusion of speech and text features in S2T model.
We first design and release a 10GB linguistic probing benchmark, namely Speech-Senteval, to investigate the acoustic and linguistic behaviors of S2T models.
Preliminary analysis reveals that the uppermost encoder layers of the S2T model can not learn linguistic knowledge efficiently, which is crucial for accurate translation.
Based on the finding, we further propose a simple plug-in prompt-learning strategy on the uppermost encoder layers to broaden the abstract representation power of the encoder of S2T models.
We call such a prompt-enhanced S2T model PromptST.
Experimental results on four widely-used S2T datasets show that PromptST can deliver significant improvements over a strong baseline by capturing richer linguistic knowledge.
Benchmarks, code, and scripts are freely available at https://github.com/ytf-philp/PromptST.

PromptST: Abstract Prompt Learning for End-to-End Speech Translation

A major concern in using deep learning based generative models for document-grounded dialogs is the potential generation of responses that are not faithful to the underlying document. Existing automated metrics used for evaluating the faithfulness of response with respect to the grounding document measure the degree of similarity between the generated response and the document's content. However, these automated metrics are far from being well aligned with human judgments. Therefore, to improve the measurement of faithfulness, we propose a new metric that utilizes (Conditional) Point-wise Mutual Information (PMI) between the generated response and the source document, conditioned on the dialogue. PMI quantifies the extent to which the document influences the generated response -- with a higher PMI indicating a more faithful response. We build upon this idea to create a new decoding technique that incorporates PMI into the response generation process to predict more faithful responses. Our experiments on the BEGIN benchmark demonstrate an improved correlation of our metric with human evaluation. We also show that our decoding technique is effective in generating more faithful responses when compared to standard decoding techniques on a set of publicly available document-grounded dialog datasets.

Pointwise Mutual Information Based Metric and Decoding Strategy for Faithful Generation in Document Grounded Dialogs

The use of persona-grounded retrieval-based chatbots is crucial for personalized conversations, but there are several challenges that need to be addressed. 1) In general, collecting persona-grounded corpus is very expensive. 2) The chatbot system does not always respond in consideration of persona at real applications. To address these challenges, we propose a plug-and-play persona prompting method. Our system can function as a standard open-domain chatbot if persona information is not available. We demonstrate that this approach performs well in the zero-shot setting, which reduces the dependence on persona-ground training data. This makes it easier to expand the system to other languages without the need to build a persona-grounded corpus. Additionally, our model can be fine-tuned for even better performance. In our experiments, the zero-shot model improved the standard model by 7.71 and 1.04 points in the original persona and revised persona, respectively. The fine-tuned model improved the previous state-of-the-art system by 1.95 and 3.39 points in the original persona and revised persona, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to solve the problem of personalized response selection using prompt sequences. Our code is available on github~\footnote{https://github.com/rungjoo/plug-and-play-prompt-persona}.

P5: Plug-and-Play Persona Prompting for Personalized Response Selection

We propose AnyTOD, an end-to-end, zero-shot task-oriented dialog (TOD) system capable of zero-shot adaptation onto unseen tasks or domains. We view TOD as a program executed by a language model (LM), where program logic and ontology is provided by a designer as a schema. To enable generalization to unseen schemas and programs without prior training, AnyTOD adopts a neuro-symbolic approach. A neural LM keeps track of events that occur during a conversation, and a symbolic program implementing dialog policy is executed to recommend actions AnyTOD should take. This approach drastically reduces data annotation and model training requirements, addressing the enduring challenge of rapidly adapting a TOD system to unseen tasks and domains. We demonstrate state-of-the-art results on STAR, ABCD and SGD benchmarks. We also demonstrate strong zero-shot transfer ability in low-resource settings, such as zero-shot transfer onto MultiWOZ. In addition, we release STARv2, an updated version of the STAR dataset with richer annotations, for benchmarking zero-shot task transfer for end-to-end TOD models.

AnyTOD: A Programmable Task-Oriented Dialog System

Continuous learning from free-text human feedback, such as error corrections, new knowledge, or alternative responses, is essential for today's chatbots and virtual assistants to stay up-to-date, engaging, and socially acceptable. However, for research on methods for learning from such data, annotated data is scarce. To address this, we examine the error and user response types of six popular dialogue datasets from various types, including MultiWoZ, PersonaChat, Wizards-of-Wikipedia, and others, to assess their extendibility with the needed annotations. For this corpus study, we manually annotate a subset of each dataset with error and user response types using an improved version of the Integrated Error Taxonomy and a newly proposed user response type taxonomy. We provide the resulting dataset (EURTAD) to the community. Our findings provide new insights into dataset composition, including error types, user response types, and the relations between them.

Learning From Free-Text Human Feedback – Collect New Datasets Or Extend Existing Ones?

We investigate the effect of sub-word tokenization on representations of German noun compounds: single orthographic words which are composed of two or more constituents but often tokenized into units that are not morphologically motivated or meaningful. Using variants of BERT models and tokenization strategies on domain-specific restricted diachronic data, we introduce a suite of evaluations relying on the masked language modelling task and compositionality prediction. We obtain the most consistent improvements by pre-splitting compounds into constituents.

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Next from EMNLP 2023

SuperDialseg: A Large-scale Dataset for Supervised Dialogue Segmentation