Compositional Generalization for Multi-label Text Classification: A Data-Augmentation Approach

Despite significant advancements in multi-label text classification, the ability of existing models to generalize to novel and seldom-encountered complex concepts, which are compositions of elementary ones, remains underexplored. This research addresses this gap. By creating unique data splits across three benchmarks, we assess the compositional generalization ability of existing multi-label text classification models. Our results show that these models often fail to generalize to compositional concepts encountered infrequently during training, leading to inferior performance on tests with these new combinations. To address this, we introduce a data augmentation method that leverages two innovative text generation models designed to enhance the classification models' capacity for compositional generalization. Our experiments show that this data augmentation approach significantly improves the compositional generalization capabilities of classification models on our benchmarks, with both generation models surpassing other text generation baselines.

A Bi-directional Multi-hop Inference Model for Joint Dialog Sentiment Classification and Act Recognition

The joint task of Dialog Sentiment Classification (DSC) and Act Recognition (DAR) aims to predict the sentiment label and act label for each utterance in a dialog simultaneously. However, current methods encode the dialog context in only one direction, which limits their ability to thoroughly comprehend the context. Moreover, these methods overlook the explicit correlations between sentiment and act labels, which leads to an insufficient ability to capture rich sentiment and act clues and hinders effective and accurate reasoning. To address these issues, we propose a Bi-directional Multi-hop Inference Model (BMIM) that leverages a feature selection network and a bi-directional multi-hop inference network to iteratively extract and integrate rich sentiment and act clues in a bi-directional manner. We also employ contrastive learning and dual learning to explicitly model the correlations of sentiment and act labels. Our experiments on two widely-used datasets show that BMIM outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by at least 2.6% on F1 score in DAR and 1.4% on F1 score in DSC. Additionally, Our proposed model not only improves the performance but also enhances the interpretability of the joint sentiment and act prediction task.

FACTUAL: A Benchmark for Faithful and Consistent Textual Scene Graph Parsing

Textual scene graph parsing has become increasingly important in various vision-language applications, including image caption evaluation and image retrieval. However, existing scene graph parsers that convert image captions into scene graphs often suffer from two types of errors. First, the generated scene graphs fail to capture the true semantics of the captions or the corresponding images, resulting in a lack of faithfulness. Second, the generated scene graphs have high inconsistency, with the same semantics represented by different annotations. To address these challenges, we propose a novel dataset, which involves re-annotating the captions in Visual Genome (VG) using a new intermediate representation called FACTUAL-MR. FACTUAL-MR can be directly converted into faithful and consistent scene graph annotations. Our experimental results clearly demonstrate that the parser trained on our dataset outperforms existing approaches in terms of faithfulness and consistency. This improvement leads to a significant performance boost in both image caption evaluation and zero-shot image retrieval tasks. Furthermore, we introduce a novel metric for measuring scene graph similarity, which, when combined with the improved scene graph parser, achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on multiple benchmark datasets for the aforementioned tasks. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/zhuang-li/FACTUAL .