Modeling Empathy and Distress in Reaction to News Stories

Computational detection and understanding of empathy is an important factor in advancing human-computer interaction. Yet to date, text-based empathy prediction has the following major limitations: It underestimates the psychological complexity of the phenomenon, adheres to a weak notion of ground truth where empathic states are ascribed by third parties, and lacks a shared corpus. In contrast, this contribution presents the first publicly available gold standard for empathy prediction. It is constructed using a novel annotation methodology which reliably captures empathy assessments by the writer of a statement using multi-item scales. This is also the first computational work distinguishing between multiple forms of empathy, empathic concern, and personal distress, as recognized throughout psychology. Finally, we present experimental results for three different predictive models, of which a CNN performs the best.Comment: To appear at EMNLP 201

A parallel corpus of Python functions and documentation strings for automated code documentation and code generation

Automated documentation of programming source code and automated code generation from natural language are challenging tasks of both practical and scientific interest. Progress in these areas has been limited by the low availability of parallel corpora of code and natural language descriptions, which tend to be small and constrained to specific domains. In this work we introduce a large and diverse parallel corpus of a hundred thousands Python functions with their documentation strings ("docstrings") generated by scraping open source repositories on GitHub. We describe baseline results for the code documentation and code generation tasks obtained by neural machine translation. We also experiment with data augmentation techniques to further increase the amount of training data. We release our datasets and processing scripts in order to stimulate research in these areas.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure, 3 table

LADER: Log-Augmented DEnse Retrieval for Biomedical Literature Search

Queries with similar information needs tend to have similar document clicks, especially in biomedical literature search engines where queries are generally short and top documents account for most of the total clicks. Motivated by this, we present a novel architecture for biomedical literature search, namely Log-Augmented DEnse Retrieval (LADER), which is a simple plug-in module that augments a dense retriever with the click logs retrieved from similar training queries. Specifically, LADER finds both similar documents and queries to the given query by a dense retriever. Then, LADER scores relevant (clicked) documents of similar queries weighted by their similarity to the input query. The final document scores by LADER are the average of (1) the document similarity scores from the dense retriever and (2) the aggregated document scores from the click logs of similar queries. Despite its simplicity, LADER achieves new state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on TripClick, a recently released benchmark for biomedical literature retrieval. On the frequent (HEAD) queries, LADER largely outperforms the best retrieval model by 39% relative NDCG@10 (0.338 v.s. 0.243). LADER also achieves better performance on the less frequent (TORSO) queries with 11% relative NDCG@10 improvement over the previous SOTA (0.303 v.s. 0.272). On the rare (TAIL) queries where similar queries are scarce, LADER still compares favorably to the previous SOTA method (NDCG@10: 0.310 v.s. 0.295). On all queries, LADER can improve the performance of a dense retriever by 24%-37% relative NDCG@10 while not requiring additional training, and further performance improvement is expected from more logs. Our regression analysis has shown that queries that are more frequent, have higher entropy of query similarity and lower entropy of document similarity, tend to benefit more from log augmentation.Comment: SIGIR 202

Relation Extraction as Open-book Examination: Retrieval-enhanced Prompt Tuning

Pre-trained language models have contributed significantly to relation extraction by demonstrating remarkable few-shot learning abilities. However, prompt tuning methods for relation extraction may still fail to generalize to those rare or hard patterns. Note that the previous parametric learning paradigm can be viewed as memorization regarding training data as a book and inference as the close-book test. Those long-tailed or hard patterns can hardly be memorized in parameters given few-shot instances. To this end, we regard RE as an open-book examination and propose a new semiparametric paradigm of retrieval-enhanced prompt tuning for relation extraction. We construct an open-book datastore for retrieval regarding prompt-based instance representations and corresponding relation labels as memorized key-value pairs. During inference, the model can infer relations by linearly interpolating the base output of PLM with the non-parametric nearest neighbor distribution over the datastore. In this way, our model not only infers relation through knowledge stored in the weights during training but also assists decision-making by unwinding and querying examples in the open-book datastore. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that our method can achieve state-of-the-art in both standard supervised and few-shot settings. Code are available in https://github.com/zjunlp/PromptKG/tree/main/research/RetrievalRE.Comment: Accepted by SIGIR 2022, short pape

An Exploration of Neural Sequence-to-Sequence Architectures for Automatic Post-Editing

In this work, we explore multiple neural architectures adapted for the task of automatic post-editing of machine translation output. We focus on neural end-to-end models that combine both inputs $mt$ (raw MT output) and $src$ (source language input) in a single neural architecture, modeling $\{mt, src\} \rightarrow pe$ directly. Apart from that, we investigate the influence of hard-attention models which seem to be well-suited for monolingual tasks, as well as combinations of both ideas. We report results on data sets provided during the WMT-2016 shared task on automatic post-editing and can demonstrate that dual-attention models that incorporate all available data in the APE scenario in a single model improve on the best shared task system and on all other published results after the shared task. Dual-attention models that are combined with hard attention remain competitive despite applying fewer changes to the input.Comment: Accepted for presentation at IJCNLP 201

A Unified Framework for Slot based Response Generation in a Multimodal Dialogue System

Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Natural Language Generation (NLG) are the two critical components of every conversational system that handles the task of understanding the user by capturing the necessary information in the form of slots and generating an appropriate response in accordance with the extracted information. Recently, dialogue systems integrated with complementary information such as images, audio, or video have gained immense popularity. In this work, we propose an end-to-end framework with the capability to extract necessary slot values from the utterance and generate a coherent response, thereby assisting the user to achieve their desired goals in a multimodal dialogue system having both textual and visual information. The task of extracting the necessary information is dependent not only on the text but also on the visual cues present in the dialogue. Similarly, for the generation, the previous dialog context comprising multimodal information is significant for providing coherent and informative responses. We employ a multimodal hierarchical encoder using pre-trained DialoGPT and also exploit the knowledge base (Kb) to provide a stronger context for both the tasks. Finally, we design a slot attention mechanism to focus on the necessary information in a given utterance. Lastly, a decoder generates the corresponding response for the given dialogue context and the extracted slot values. Experimental results on the Multimodal Dialogue Dataset (MMD) show that the proposed framework outperforms the baselines approaches in both the tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/avinashsai/slot-gpt.Comment: Published in the journal Multimedia Tools and Application