The Ubuntu Dialogue Corpus: A Large Dataset for Research in Unstructured Multi-Turn Dialogue Systems

This paper introduces the Ubuntu Dialogue Corpus, a dataset containing almost 1 million multi-turn dialogues, with a total of over 7 million utterances and 100 million words. This provides a unique resource for research into building dialogue managers based on neural language models that can make use of large amounts of unlabeled data. The dataset has both the multi-turn property of conversations in the Dialog State Tracking Challenge datasets, and the unstructured nature of interactions from microblog services such as Twitter. We also describe two neural learning architectures suitable for analyzing this dataset, and provide benchmark performance on the task of selecting the best next response.Comment: SIGDIAL 2015. 10 pages, 5 figures. Update includes link to new version of the dataset, with some added features and bug fixes. See: https://github.com/rkadlec/ubuntu-ranking-dataset-creato

Who did They Respond to? Conversation Structure Modeling using Masked Hierarchical Transformer

Conversation structure is useful for both understanding the nature of conversation dynamics and for providing features for many downstream applications such as summarization of conversations. In this work, we define the problem of conversation structure modeling as identifying the parent utterance(s) to which each utterance in the conversation responds to. Previous work usually took a pair of utterances to decide whether one utterance is the parent of the other. We believe the entire ancestral history is a very important information source to make accurate prediction. Therefore, we design a novel masking mechanism to guide the ancestor flow, and leverage the transformer model to aggregate all ancestors to predict parent utterances. Our experiments are performed on the Reddit dataset (Zhang, Culbertson, and Paritosh 2017) and the Ubuntu IRC dataset (Kummerfeld et al. 2019). In addition, we also report experiments on a new larger corpus from the Reddit platform and release this dataset. We show that the proposed model, that takes into account the ancestral history of the conversation, significantly outperforms several strong baselines including the BERT model on all datasetsComment: AAAI 202

Text Style Transfer: A Review and Experimental Evaluation

The stylistic properties of text have intrigued computational linguistics researchers in recent years. Specifically, researchers have investigated the Text Style Transfer (TST) task, which aims to change the stylistic properties of the text while retaining its style independent content. Over the last few years, many novel TST algorithms have been developed, while the industry has leveraged these algorithms to enable exciting TST applications. The field of TST research has burgeoned because of this symbiosis. This article aims to provide a comprehensive review of recent research efforts on text style transfer. More concretely, we create a taxonomy to organize the TST models and provide a comprehensive summary of the state of the art. We review the existing evaluation methodologies for TST tasks and conduct a large-scale reproducibility study where we experimentally benchmark 19 state-of-the-art TST algorithms on two publicly available datasets. Finally, we expand on current trends and provide new perspectives on the new and exciting developments in the TST field

Conversation Disentanglement with Bi-Level Contrastive Learning

Conversation disentanglement aims to group utterances into detached sessions, which is a fundamental task in processing multi-party conversations. Existing methods have two main drawbacks. First, they overemphasize pairwise utterance relations but pay inadequate attention to the utterance-to-context relation modeling. Second, huge amount of human annotated data is required for training, which is expensive to obtain in practice. To address these issues, we propose a general disentangle model based on bi-level contrastive learning. It brings closer utterances in the same session while encourages each utterance to be near its clustered session prototypes in the representation space. Unlike existing approaches, our disentangle model works in both supervised setting with labeled data and unsupervised setting when no such data is available. The proposed method achieves new state-of-the-art performance on both settings across several public datasets