In our dynamic world where data arrives in a continuous stream, continual learning enables us to incrementally add new tasks/domains without the need to retrain from scratch. A major challenge in continual learning of language model is catastrophic forgetting, the tendency of models to forget knowledge from previously trained tasks/domains when training on new ones. This paper studies dialog generation under the continual learning setting. We propose a novel method that 1) uses \textit{Text-Mixup} as data augmentation to avoid model overfitting on replay memory and 2) leverages Batch-Nuclear Norm Maximization (BNNM) to alleviate the problem of mode collapse. Experiments on a $37$-domain task-oriented dialog dataset and DailyDialog (a $10$-domain chitchat dataset) demonstrate that our proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art in continual learning.
In this technical report, we present TeleChat, a collection of large language models (LLMs) with parameters of 3 billion, 7 billion and 12 billion. It includes pretrained language models as well as fine-tuned chat models that is aligned with human preferences. TeleChat is initially pretrained on an extensive corpus containing a diverse collection of texts from both English and Chinese languages, including trillions of tokens. Subsequently, the model undergoes fine-tuning to align with human preferences, following a detailed methodology that we describe. We evaluate the performance of TeleChat on various tasks, including language understanding, mathematics, reasoning, code generation, and knowledge-based question answering. Our findings indicate that TeleChat achieves comparable performance to other open-source models of similar size across a wide range of public benchmarks. To support future research and applications utilizing LLMs, we release the fine-tuned model checkpoints of TeleChat's 7B and 12B variant, along with code and a portion of our pretraining data, to the public community.
Session-based Recommendation (SR) aims to predict users' next click based on their behavior within a short period, which is crucial for online platforms. However, most existing SR methods somewhat ignore the fact that user preference is not necessarily strongly related to the order of interactions. Moreover, they ignore the differences in importance between different samples, which limits the model-fitting performance. To tackle these issues, we put forward the method, Mining Interest Trends and Adaptively Assigning Sample Weight, abbreviated as MTAW. Specifically, we model users' instant interest based on their present behavior and all their previous behaviors. Meanwhile, we discriminatively integrate instant interests to capture the changing trend of user interest to make more personalized recommendations. Furthermore, we devise a novel loss function that dynamically weights the samples according to their prediction difficulty in the current epoch. Extensive experimental results on two benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our method.
Knowledge graphs (KGs) have been widely used for question answering (QA) applications, especially the entity based QA. However, searching an-swers from an entire large-scale knowledge graph is very time-consuming and it is hard to meet the speed need of real online QA systems. In this pa-per, we design a sub-graph searching mechanism to solve this problem by creating sub-graph index, and each answer generation step is restricted in the sub-graph level. We use this mechanism into a real online QA chat system, and it can bring obvious improvement on question coverage by well answer-ing entity based questions, and it can be with a very high speed, which en-sures the user experience of online QA.
In response generation task, proper sentimental expressions can obviously improve the human-like level of the responses. However, for real application in online systems, high QPS (queries per second, an indicator of the flow capacity of on-line systems) is required, and a dynamic vocabulary mechanism has been proved available in improving speed of generative models. In this paper, we proposed an emotion-controlled dialog response generation model based on the dynamic vocabulary mechanism, and the experimental results show the benefit of this model.
Automatic question-answering (QA) systems have boomed during last few years, and commonly used techniques can be roughly categorized into Information Retrieval (IR)-based and generation-based. A key solution to the IR based models is to retrieve the most similar knowledge entries of a given query from a QA knowledge base, and then rerank those knowledge entries with semantic matching models. In this paper, we aim to improve an IR based e-commerce QA system-AliMe with proposed text matching models, including a basic Triple Convolutional Neural Network (TCNN) model and two Attention-based TCNN (ATCNN) models. Experimental results show their effect.
Conversational context understanding aims to recognize the real intention of user from the conversation history, which is critical for building the dialogue system. However, the multi-turn conversation understanding in open domain is still quite challenging, which requires the system extracting the important information and resolving the dependencies in contexts among a variety of open topics. In this paper, we propose the conversational query rewriting model - MLR, which is a Multi-task model on sequence Labeling and query Rewriting. MLR reformulates the multi-turn conversational queries into a single turn query, which conveys the true intention of users concisely and alleviates the difficulty of the multi-turn dialogue modeling. In the model, we formulate the query rewriting as a sequence generation problem and introduce word category information via the auxiliary word category label predicting task. To train our model, we construct a new Chinese query rewriting dataset and conduct experiments on it. The experimental results show that our model outperforms compared models, and prove the effectiveness of the word category information in improving the rewriting performance.
In this paper, we study transfer learning for the PI and NLI problems, aiming to propose a general framework, which can effectively and efficiently adapt the shared knowledge learned from a resource-rich source domain to a resource- poor target domain. Specifically, since most existing transfer learning methods only focus on learning a shared feature space across domains while ignoring the relationship between the source and target domains, we propose to simultaneously learn shared representations and domain relationships in a unified framework. Furthermore, we propose an efficient and effective hybrid model by combining a sentence encoding- based method and a sentence interaction-based method as our base model. Extensive experiments on both paraphrase identification and natural language inference demonstrate that our base model is efficient and has promising performance compared to the competing models, and our transfer learning method can help to significantly boost the performance. Further analysis shows that the inter-domain and intra-domain relationship captured by our model are insightful. Last but not least, we deploy our transfer learning model for PI into our online chatbot system, which can bring in significant improvements over our existing system. Finally, we launch our new system on the chatbot platform Eva in our E-commerce site AliExpress.
Our FRDC_QA team participated in the QA-Lab English subtask of the NTCIR-11. In this paper, we describe our system for solving real-world university entrance exam questions, which are related to world history. Wikipedia is used as the main external resource for our system. Since problems with choosing right/wrong sentence from multiple sentence choices account for about two-thirds of the total, we individually design a classification based model for solving this type of questions. For other types of questions, we also design some simple methods.
In this paper, we propose a Concept-level Emotion Cause Model (CECM), instead of the mere word-level models, to discover causes of microblogging users' diversified emotions on specific hot event. A modified topic-supervised biterm topic model is utilized in CECM to detect emotion topics' in event-related tweets, and then context-sensitive topical PageRank is utilized to detect meaningful multiword expressions as emotion causes. Experimental results on a dataset from Sina Weibo, one of the largest microblogging websites in China, show CECM can better detect emotion causes than baseline methods.