CAiRE in DialDoc21: Data Augmentation for Information-Seeking Dialogue System

Information-seeking dialogue systems, including knowledge identification and response generation, aim to respond to users with fluent, coherent, and informative responses based on users' needs, which. To tackle this challenge, we utilize data augmentation methods and several training techniques with the pre-trained language models to learn a general pattern of the task and thus achieve promising performance. In DialDoc21 competition, our system achieved 74.95 F1 score and 60.74 Exact Match score in subtask 1, and 37.72 SacreBLEU score in subtask 2. Empirical analysis is provided to explain the effectiveness of our approaches.

BiToD: A Bilingual Multi-Domain Dataset For Task-Oriented Dialogue Modeling

Task-oriented dialogue (ToD) benchmarks provide an important avenue to measure progress and develop better conversational agents. However, existing datasets for end-to-end ToD modeling are limited to a single language, hindering the development of robust end-to-end ToD systems for multilingual countries and regions. Here we introduce BiToD, the first bilingual multi-domain dataset for end-to-end task-oriented dialogue modeling. BiToD contains over 7k multi-domain dialogues (144k utterances) with a large and realistic bilingual knowledge base. It serves as an effective benchmark for evaluating bilingual ToD systems and cross-lingual transfer learning approaches. We provide state-of-the-art baselines under three evaluation settings (monolingual, bilingual, and cross-lingual). The analysis of our baselines in different settings highlights 1) the effectiveness of training a bilingual ToD system compared to two independent monolingual ToD systems, and 2) the potential of leveraging a bilingual knowledge base and cross-lingual transfer learning to improve the system performance under low resource condition.

QAConv: Question Answering on Informative Conversations

This paper introduces QAConv, a new question answering (QA) dataset that uses conversations as a knowledge source. We focus on informative conversations including business emails, panel discussions, and work channels. Unlike open-domain and task-oriented dialogues, these conversations are usually long, complex, asynchronous, and involve strong domain knowledge. In total, we collect 34,204 QA pairs, including span-based, free-form, and unanswerable questions, from 10,259 selected conversations with both human-written and machine-generated questions. We segment long conversations into chunks, and use a question generator and dialogue summarizer as auxiliary tools to collect multi-hop questions. The dataset has two testing scenarios, chunk mode and full mode, depending on whether the grounded chunk is provided or retrieved from a large conversational pool. Experimental results show that state-of-the-art QA systems trained on existing QA datasets have limited zero-shot ability and tend to predict our questions as unanswerable. Fine-tuning such systems on our corpus can achieve significant improvement up to 23.6% and 13.6% in both chunk mode and full mode, respectively.

Retrieval-Free Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Response Generation with Adapters

To diversify and enrich generated dialogue responses, knowledge-grounded dialogue has been investigated in recent years. Despite the success of the existing methods, they mainly follow the paradigm of retrieving the relevant sentences over a large corpus and augment the dialogues with explicit extra information, which is time- and resource-consuming. In this paper, we propose KnowExpert, an end-to-end framework to bypass the retrieval process by injecting prior knowledge into the pre-trained language models with lightweight adapters. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to tackle this task relying solely on a generation-based approach. Experimental results show that KnowExpert performs comparably with the retrieval-based baselines, demonstrating the potential of our proposed direction.

Leveraging Slot Descriptions for Zero-Shot Cross-Domain Dialogue State Tracking

Zero-shot cross-domain dialogue state tracking (DST) enables us to handle task-oriented dialogue in unseen domains without the expense of collecting in-domain data. In this paper, we propose a slot description enhanced generative approach for zero-shot cross-domain DST. Specifically, our model first encodes dialogue context and slots with a pre-trained self-attentive encoder, and generates slot values in an auto-regressive manner. In addition, we incorporate Slot Type Informed Descriptions that capture the shared information across slots to facilitate cross-domain knowledge transfer. Experimental results on the MultiWOZ dataset show that our proposed method significantly improves existing state-of-the-art results in the zero-shot cross-domain setting.

Dynamically Addressing Unseen Rumor via Continual Learning

Rumors are often associated with newly emerging events, thus, an ability to deal with unseen rumors is crucial for a rumor veracity classification model. Previous works address this issue by improving the model's generalizability, with an assumption that the model will stay unchanged even after the new outbreak of an event. In this work, we propose an alternative solution to continuously update the model in accordance with the dynamics of rumor domain creations. The biggest technical challenge associated with this new approach is the catastrophic forgetting of previous learnings due to new learnings. We adopt continual learning strategies that control the new learnings to avoid catastrophic forgetting and propose an additional strategy that can jointly be used to strengthen the forgetting alleviation.

Neural Path Hunter: Reducing Hallucination in Dialogue Systems via Path Grounding

Dialogue systems powered by large pre-trained language models (LM) exhibit an innate ability to deliver fluent and natural-looking responses. Despite their impressive generation performance, these models can often generate factually incorrect statements impeding their widespread adoption. In this paper, we focus on the task of improving the faithfulness -- and thus reduce hallucination -- of Neural Dialogue Systems to known facts supplied by a Knowledge Graph (KG). We propose Neural Path Hunter which follows a generate-then-refine strategy whereby a generated response is amended using the k-hop subgraph of a KG. Neural Path Hunter leverages a separate token-level fact critic to identify plausible sources of hallucination followed by a refinement stage consisting of a chain of two neural LM's that retrieves correct entities by crafting a query signal that is propagated over the k-hop subgraph. Our proposed model can easily be applied to any dialogue generated responses without retraining the model. We empirically validate our proposed approach on the OpenDialKG dataset against a suite of metrics and report a relative improvement of faithfulness over GPT2 dialogue responses by 8.4%.

Mitigating Media Bias through Neutral Article Generation

Media bias can lead to increased political polarization, and thus, the need for automatic mitigation methods is growing. Existing mitigation work displays articles from multiple news outlets to provide diverse news coverage, but without neutralizing the bias inherent in each of the displayed articles. Therefore, we propose a new task, a single neutralized article generation out of multiple biased articles, to facilitate more efficient access to balanced and unbiased information. In this paper, we compile a new dataset NeuWS, define an automatic evaluation metric, and provide baselines and multiple analyses to serve as a solid starting point for the proposed task. Lastly, we obtain a human evaluation to demonstrate the alignment between our metric and human judgment.

Are Multilingual Models Effective in Code-Switching?

Multilingual language models have shown decent performance in multilingual and cross-lingual natural language understanding tasks. However, the power of these multilingual models in code-switching tasks has not been fully explored. In this paper, we study the effectiveness of multilingual language models to understand their capability and adaptability to the mixed-language setting by considering the inference speed, performance, and number of parameters to measure their practicality. We conduct experiments in three language pairs on named entity recognition and part-of-speech tagging and compare them with existing methods, such as using bilingual embeddings and multilingual meta-embeddings. Our findings suggest that pre-trained multilingual models do not necessarily guarantee high-quality representations on code-switching, while using meta-embeddings achieves similar results with significantly fewer parameters.