Don't Forget Your ABC's: Evaluating the State-of-the-Art in Chat-Oriented Dialogue Systems

There has been great recent advancement in human-computer chat. However, proper evaluation currently requires human judgements that produce notoriously high-variance metrics due to their inherent subjectivity. Furthermore, there is little standardization in the methods and labels used for evaluation, with an overall lack of work to compare and assess the validity of various evaluation approaches. As a consequence, existing evaluation results likely leave an incomplete picture of the strengths and weaknesses of open-domain chatbots. We aim towards a dimensional evaluation of human-computer chat that can reliably measure several distinct aspects of chat quality. To this end, we present our novel human evaluation method that quantifies the rate of several quality-related chatbot behaviors. Our results demonstrate our method to be more suitable for dimensional chat evaluation than alternative likert-style or comparative methods. We then use our validated method and existing methods to evaluate four open-domain chat models from the recent literature.

Online Coreference Resolution for Dialogue Processing: Improving Mention-Linking on Real-Time Conversations

This paper suggests a direction of coreference resolution for online decoding on actively generated input such as dialogue, where the model accepts an utterance and its past context, then finds mentions in the current utterance as well as their referents, upon each dialogue turn. A baseline and four incremental-updated models adapted from the mention-linking paradigm are proposed for this new setting, which address different aspects including the singletons, speaker-grounded encoding and cross-turn mention contextualization. Our approach is assessed on three datasets: Friends, OntoNotes, and BOLT. Results show that each aspect brings out steady improvement, and our best models outperform the baseline by over 10%, presenting an effective system for this setting. Further analysis highlights the task characteristics, such as the significance of addressing the mention recall.

Modeling Task Interactions in Document-Level Joint Entity and Relation Extraction

We target on the document-level relation extraction in an end-to-end setting, where the model needs to jointly perform mention extraction, coreference resolution (COREF) and relation extraction (RE) at once, and gets evaluated in an entity-centric way. Especially, we address the two-way interaction between COREF and RE that has not been the focus by previous work, and propose to introduce explicit interaction namely Graph Compatibility (GC) that is specifically designed to leverage task characteristics, bridging decisions of two tasks for direct task interference. Our experiments are conducted on DocRED and DWIE; in addition to GC, we implement and compare different multi-task settings commonly adopted in previous work, including pipeline, shared encoders, graph propagation, to examine the effectiveness of different interactions. The result shows that GC achieves the best performance by up to 2.3/5.1 F1 improvement over the baseline.

Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Machine Reading Comprehension via Inter-Sentence Dependency Graph

We target the task of cross-lingual Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) in the direct zero-shot setting, by incorporating syntactic features from Universal Dependencies (UD), and the key features we use are the syntactic relations within each sentence. While previous work has demonstrated effective syntax-guided MRC models, we propose to adopt the inter-sentence syntactic relations, in addition to the rudimentary intra-sentence relations, to further utilize the syntactic dependencies in the multi-sentence input of the MRC task. In our approach, we build the Inter-Sentence Dependency Graph (ISDG) connecting dependency trees to form global syntactic relations across sentences. We then propose the ISDG encoder that encodes the global dependency graph, addressing the inter-sentence relations via both one-hop and multi-hop dependency paths explicitly. Experiments on three multilingual MRC datasets (XQuAD, MLQA, TyDiQA-GoldP) show that our encoder that is only trained on English is able to improve the zero-shot performance on all 14 test sets covering 8 languages, with up to 3.8 F1 / 5.2 EM improvement on-average, and 5.2 F1 / 11.2 EM on certain languages. Further analysis shows the improvement can be attributed to the attention on the cross-linguistically consistent syntactic path.

NL-Augmenter: A Framework for Task-Sensitive Natural Language Augmentation

Data augmentation is an important component in the robustness evaluation of models in natural language processing (NLP) and in enhancing the diversity of the data they are trained on. In this paper, we present NL-Augmenter, a new participatory Python-based natural language augmentation framework which supports the creation of both transformations (modifications to the data) and filters (data splits according to specific features). We describe the framework and an initial set of 117 transformations and 23 filters for a variety of natural language tasks. We demonstrate the efficacy of NL-Augmenter by using several of its transformations to analyze the robustness of popular natural language models. The infrastructure, datacards and robustness analysis results are available publicly on the NL-Augmenter repository (\url{https://github.com/GEM-benchmark/NL-Augmenter}).

What Went Wrong? Explaining Overall Dialogue Quality through Utterance-Level Impacts

Improving user experience of a dialogue system often requires intensive developer effort to read conversation logs, run statistical analyses, and intuit the relative importance of system shortcomings. This paper presents a novel approach to automated analysis of conversation logs that learns the relationship between user-system interactions and overall dialogue quality. Unlike prior work on utterance-level quality prediction, our approach learns the impact of each interaction from the overall user rating without utterance-level annotation, allowing resultant model conclusions to be derived on the basis of empirical evidence and at low cost. Our model identifies interactions that have a strong correlation with the overall dialogue quality in a chatbot setting. Experiments show that the automated analysis from our model agrees with expert judgments, making this work the first to show that such weakly-supervised learning of utterance-level quality prediction is highly achievable.

An Approach to Inference-Driven Dialogue Management within a Social Chatbot

We present a chatbot implementing a novel dialogue management approach based on logical inference. Instead of framing conversation a sequence of response generation tasks, we model conversation as a collaborative inference process in which speakers share information to synthesize new knowledge in real time. Our chatbot pipeline accomplishes this modelling in three broad stages. The first stage translates user utterances into a symbolic predicate representation. The second stage then uses this structured representation in conjunction with a larger knowledge base to synthesize new predicates using efficient graph matching. In the third and final stage, our bot selects a small subset of predicates and translates them into an English response. This approach lends itself to understanding latent semantics of user inputs, flexible initiative taking, and responses that are novel and coherent with the dialogue context.

Intensionalizing Abstract Meaning Representations: Non-Veridicality and Scope

Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) is a graphical meaning representation language designed to represent propositional information about argument structure. However, at present it is unable to satisfyingly represent non-veridical intensional contexts, often licensing inappropriate inferences. In this paper, we show how to resolve the problem of non-veridicality without appealing to layered graphs through a mapping from AMRs into Simply-Typed Lambda Calculus (STLC). At least for some cases, this requires the introduction of a new role :content which functions as an intensional operator. The translation proposed is inspired by the formal linguistics literature on the event semantics of attitude reports. Next, we address the interaction of quantifier scope and intensional operators in so-called de re/de dicto ambiguities. We adopt a scope node from the literature and provide an explicit multidimensional semantics utilizing Cooper storage which allows us to derive the de re and de dicto scope readings as well as intermediate scope readings which prove difficult for accounts without a scope node.