A Pairwise Dataset for GUI Conversion and Retrieval between Android Phones and Tablets

With the popularity of smartphones and tablets, users have become accustomed to using different devices for different tasks, such as using their phones to play games and tablets to watch movies. To conquer the market, one app is often available on both smartphones and tablets. However, although one app has similar graphic user interfaces (GUIs) and functionalities on phone and tablet, current app developers typically start from scratch when developing a tablet-compatible version of their app, which drives up development costs and wastes existing design resources. Researchers are attempting to employ deep learning in automated GUIs development to enhance developers' productivity. Deep learning models rely heavily on high-quality datasets. There are currently several publicly accessible GUI page datasets for phones, but none for pairwise GUIs between phones and tablets. This poses a significant barrier to the employment of deep learning in automated GUI development. In this paper, we collect and make public the Papt dataset, which is a pairwise dataset for GUI conversion and retrieval between Android phones and tablets. The dataset contains 10,035 phone-tablet GUI page pairs from 5,593 phone-tablet app pairs. We illustrate the approaches of collecting pairwise data and statistical analysis of this dataset. We also illustrate the advantages of our dataset compared to other current datasets. Through preliminary experiments on this dataset, we analyse the present challenges of utilising deep learning in automated GUI development and find that our dataset can assist the application of some deep learning models to tasks involving automatic GUI development.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figure

Turning Flowchart into Dialog: Plan-based Data Augmentation for Low-Resource Flowchart-grounded Troubleshooting Dialogs

Flowchart-grounded troubleshooting dialogue (FTD) systems, which follow the instructions of a flowchart to diagnose users' problems in specific domains (eg., vehicle, laptop), have been gaining research interest in recent years. However, collecting sufficient dialogues that are naturally grounded on flowcharts is costly, thus FTD systems are impeded by scarce training data. To mitigate the data sparsity issue, we propose a plan-based data augmentation (PlanDA) approach that generates diverse synthetic dialog data at scale by transforming concise flowchart into dialogues. Specifically, its generative model employs a variational-base framework with a hierarchical planning strategy that includes global and local latent planning variables. Experiments on the FloDial dataset show that synthetic dialogue produced by PlanDA improves the performance of downstream tasks, including flowchart path retrieval and response generation, in particular on the Out-of-Flowchart settings. In addition, further analysis demonstrate the quality of synthetic data generated by PlanDA in paths that are covered by current sample dialogues and paths that are not covered

Towards Zero-Shot Personalized Table-to-Text Generation with Contrastive Persona Distillation

Existing neural methods have shown great potentials towards generating informative text from structured tabular data as well as maintaining high content fidelity. However, few of them shed light on generating personalized expressions, which often requires well-aligned persona-table-text datasets that are difficult to obtain. To overcome these obstacles, we explore personalized table-to-text generation under a zero-shot setting, by assuming no well-aligned persona-table-text triples are required during training. To this end, we firstly collect a set of unpaired persona information and then propose a semi-supervised approach with contrastive persona distillation (S2P-CPD) to generate personalized context. Specifically, tabular data and persona information are firstly represented as latent variables separately. Then, we devise a latent space fusion technique to distill persona information into the table representation. Besides, a contrastive-based discriminator is employed to guarantee the style consistency between the generated context and its corresponding persona. Experimental results on two benchmarks demonstrate S2P-CPD's ability on keeping both content fidelity and personalized expressions.Comment: Accepted by ICASSP 202

Probing Product Description Generation via Posterior Distillation

In product description generation (PDG), the user-cared aspect is critical for the recommendation system, which can not only improve user's experiences but also obtain more clicks. High-quality customer reviews can be considered as an ideal source to mine user-cared aspects. However, in reality, a large number of new products (known as long-tailed commodities) cannot gather sufficient amount of customer reviews, which brings a big challenge in the product description generation task. Existing works tend to generate the product description solely based on item information, i.e., product attributes or title words, which leads to tedious contents and cannot attract customers effectively. To tackle this problem, we propose an adaptive posterior network based on Transformer architecture that can utilize user-cared information from customer reviews. Specifically, we first extend the self-attentive Transformer encoder to encode product titles and attributes. Then, we apply an adaptive posterior distillation module to utilize useful review information, which integrates user-cared aspects to the generation process. Finally, we apply a Transformer-based decoding phase with copy mechanism to automatically generate the product description. Besides, we also collect a large-scare Chinese product description dataset to support our work and further research in this field. Experimental results show that our model is superior to traditional generative models in both automatic indicators and human evaluation