Simulated Annealing for Emotional Dialogue Systems

Explicitly modeling emotions in dialogue generation has important applications, such as building empathetic personal companions. In this study, we consider the task of expressing a specific emotion for dialogue generation. Previous approaches take the emotion as an input signal, which may be ignored during inference. We instead propose a search-based emotional dialogue system by simulated annealing (SA). Specifically, we first define a scoring function that combines contextual coherence and emotional correctness. Then, SA iteratively edits a general response and searches for a sentence with a higher score, enforcing the presence of the desired emotion. We evaluate our system on the NLPCC2017 dataset. Our proposed method shows 12% improvements in emotion accuracy compared with the previous state-of-the-art method, without hurting the generation quality (measured by BLEU).

A Globally Normalized Neural Model for Semantic Parsing

In this paper, we propose a globally normalized model for context-free grammar (CFG)-based semantic parsing. Instead of predicting a probability, our model predicts a real-valued score at each step and does not suffer from the label bias problem. Experiments show that our approach outperforms locally normalized models on small datasets, but it does not yield improvement on a large dataset.

On Generality and Knowledge Transferability in Cross-Domain Duplicate Question Detection for Heterogeneous Community Question Answering

Duplicate question detection is an ongoing challenge in community question answering because semantically equivalent questions can have significantly different words and structures. In addition, the identification of duplicate questions can reduce the resources required for retrieval, when the same questions are not repeated. This study compares the performance of deep neural networks and gradient tree boosting, and explores the possibility of domain adaptation with transfer learning to improve the under-performing target domains for the text-pair duplicates classification task, using three heterogeneous datasets: general-purpose Quora, technical Ask Ubuntu, and academic English Stack Exchange. Ultimately, our study exposes the alternative hypothesis that the meaning of a "duplicate" is not inherently general-purpose, but rather is dependent on the domain of learning, hence reducing the chance of transfer learning through adapting to the domain.