Affective-NLI: Towards Accurate and Interpretable Personality Recognition in Conversation

Personality Recognition in Conversation (PRC) aims to identify the personality traits of speakers through textual dialogue content. It is essential for providing personalized services in various applications of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), such as AI-based mental therapy and companion robots for the elderly. Most recent studies analyze the dialog content for personality classification yet overlook two major concerns that hinder their performance. First, crucial implicit factors contained in conversation, such as emotions that reflect the speakers' personalities are ignored. Second, only focusing on the input dialog content disregards the semantic understanding of personality itself, which reduces the interpretability of the results. In this paper, we propose Affective Natural Language Inference (Affective-NLI) for accurate and interpretable PRC. To utilize affectivity within dialog content for accurate personality recognition, we fine-tuned a pre-trained language model specifically for emotion recognition in conversations, facilitating real-time affective annotations for utterances. For interpretability of recognition results, we formulate personality recognition as an NLI problem by determining whether the textual description of personality labels is entailed by the dialog content. Extensive experiments on two daily conversation datasets suggest that Affective-NLI significantly outperforms (by 6%-7%) state-of-the-art approaches. Additionally, our Flow experiment demonstrates that Affective-NLI can accurately recognize the speaker's personality in the early stages of conversations by surpassing state-of-the-art methods with 22%-34%.

Personality-affected Emotion Generation in Dialog Systems

Generating appropriate emotions for responses is essential for dialog systems to provide human-like interaction in various application scenarios. Most previous dialog systems tried to achieve this goal by learning empathetic manners from anonymous conversational data. However, emotional responses generated by those methods may be inconsistent, which will decrease user engagement and service quality. Psychological findings suggest that the emotional expressions of humans are rooted in personality traits. Therefore, we propose a new task, Personality-affected Emotion Generation, to generate emotion based on the personality given to the dialog system and further investigate a solution through the personality-affected mood transition. Specifically, we first construct a daily dialog dataset, Personality EmotionLines Dataset (PELD), with emotion and personality annotations. Subsequently, we analyze the challenges in this task, i.e., (1) heterogeneously integrating personality and emotional factors and (2) extracting multi-granularity emotional information in the dialog context. Finally, we propose to model the personality as the transition weight by simulating the mood transition process in the dialog system and solve the challenges above. We conduct extensive experiments on PELD for evaluation. Results suggest that by adopting our method, the emotion generation performance is improved by 13% in macro-F1 and 5% in weighted-F1 from the BERT-base model.

Low-Resource Court Judgment Summarization for Common Law Systems

Common law courts need to refer to similar precedents' judgments to inform their current decisions. Generating high-quality summaries of court judgment documents can facilitate legal practitioners to efficiently review previous cases and assist the general public in accessing how the courts operate and how the law is applied. Previous court judgment summarization research focuses on civil law or a particular jurisdiction's judgments. However, judges can refer to the judgments from all common law jurisdictions. Current summarization datasets are insufficient to satisfy the demands of summarizing precedents across multiple jurisdictions, especially when labeled data are scarce for many jurisdictions. To address the lack of datasets, we present CLSum, the first dataset for summarizing multi-jurisdictional common law court judgment documents. Besides, this is the first court judgment summarization work adopting large language models (LLMs) in data augmentation, summary generation, and evaluation. Specifically, we design an LLM-based data augmentation method incorporating legal knowledge. We also propose a legal knowledge enhanced evaluation metric based on LLM to assess the quality of generated judgment summaries. Our experimental results verify that the LLM-based summarization methods can perform well in the few-shot and zero-shot settings. Our LLM-based data augmentation method can mitigate the impact of low data resources. Furthermore, we carry out comprehensive comparative experiments to find essential model components and settings that are capable of enhancing summarization performance.

Generating a Structured Summary of Numerous Academic Papers: Dataset and Method

Writing a survey paper on one research topic usually needs to cover the salient content from numerous related papers, which can be modeled as a multi-document summarization (MDS) task. Existing MDS datasets usually focus on producing the structureless summary covering a few input documents. Meanwhile, previous structured summary generation works focus on summarizing a single document into a multi-section summary. These existing datasets and methods cannot meet the requirements of summarizing numerous academic papers into a structured summary. To deal with the scarcity of available data, we propose BigSurvey, the first large-scale dataset for generating comprehensive summaries of numerous academic papers on each topic. We collect target summaries from more than seven thousand survey papers and utilize their 430 thousand reference papers' abstracts as input documents. To organize the diverse content from dozens of input documents and ensure the efficiency of processing long text sequences, we propose a summarization method named category-based alignment and sparse transformer (CAST). The experimental results show that our CAST method outperforms various advanced summarization methods.

Long Text and Multi-Table Summarization: Dataset and Method

Automatic document summarization aims to produce a concise summary covering the input document's salient information. Within a report document, the salient information can be scattered in the textual and non-textual content. However, existing document summarization datasets and methods usually focus on the text and filter out the non-textual content. Missing tabular data can limit produced summaries' informativeness, especially when summaries require covering quantitative descriptions of critical metrics in tables. Existing datasets and methods cannot meet the requirements of summarizing long text and multiple tables in each report. To deal with the scarcity of available data, we propose FINDSum, the first large-scale dataset for long text and multi-table summarization. Built on 21,125 annual reports from 3,794 companies, it has two subsets for summarizing each company's results of operations and liquidity. To summarize the long text and dozens of tables in each report, we present three types of summarization methods. Besides, we propose a set of evaluation metrics to assess the usage of numerical information in produced summaries. Dataset analyses and experimental results indicate the importance of jointly considering input textual and tabular data when summarizing report documents.