Improving Background Based Conversation with Context-aware Knowledge Pre-selection

Background Based Conversations (BBCs) have been developed to make dialogue systems generate more informative and natural responses by leveraging background knowledge. Existing methods for BBCs can be grouped into two categories: extraction-based methods and generation-based methods. The former extract spans frombackground material as responses that are not necessarily natural. The latter generate responses thatare natural but not necessarily effective in leveraging background knowledge. In this paper, we focus on generation-based methods and propose a model, namely Context-aware Knowledge Pre-selection (CaKe), which introduces a pre-selection process that uses dynamic bi-directional attention to improve knowledge selection by using the utterance history context as prior information to select the most relevant background material. Experimental results show that our model is superior to current state-of-the-art baselines, indicating that it benefits from the pre-selection process, thus improving in-formativeness and fluency.Comment: SCAI 2019 workshop pape

Detecting and Classifying Malevolent Dialogue Responses: Taxonomy, Data and Methodology

Conversational interfaces are increasingly popular as a way of connecting people to information. Corpus-based conversational interfaces are able to generate more diverse and natural responses than template-based or retrieval-based agents. With their increased generative capacity of corpusbased conversational agents comes the need to classify and filter out malevolent responses that are inappropriate in terms of content and dialogue acts. Previous studies on the topic of recognizing and classifying inappropriate content are mostly focused on a certain category of malevolence or on single sentences instead of an entire dialogue. In this paper, we define the task of Malevolent Dialogue Response Detection and Classification (MDRDC). We make three contributions to advance research on this task. First, we present a Hierarchical Malevolent Dialogue Taxonomy (HMDT). Second, we create a labelled multi-turn dialogue dataset and formulate the MDRDC task as a hierarchical classification task over this taxonomy. Third, we apply stateof-the-art text classification methods to the MDRDC task and report on extensive experiments aimed at assessing the performance of these approaches.Comment: under review at JASIS

FF2: A Feature Fusion Two-Stream Framework for Punctuation Restoration

To accomplish punctuation restoration, most existing methods focus on introducing extra information (e.g., part-of-speech) or addressing the class imbalance problem. Recently, large-scale transformer-based pre-trained language models (PLMS) have been utilized widely and obtained remarkable success. However, the PLMS are trained on the large dataset with marks, which may not fit well with the small dataset without marks, causing the convergence to be not ideal. In this study, we propose a Feature Fusion two-stream framework (FF2) to bridge the gap. Specifically, one stream leverages a pre-trained language model to capture the semantic feature, while another auxiliary module captures the feature at hand. We also modify the computation of multi-head attention to encourage communication among heads. Then, two features with different perspectives are aggregated to fuse information and enhance context awareness. Without additional data, the experimental results on the popular benchmark IWSLT demonstrate that FF2 achieves new SOTA performance, which verifies that our approach is effective.Comment: 5pages. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2203.1248

TLM: Token-Level Masking for Transformers

Structured dropout approaches, such as attention dropout and DropHead, have been investigated to regularize the multi-head attention mechanism in Transformers. In this paper, we propose a new regularization scheme based on token-level rather than structure-level to reduce overfitting. Specifically, we devise a novel Token-Level Masking (TLM) training strategy for Transformers to regularize the connections of self-attention, which consists of two masking techniques that are effective and easy to implement. The underlying idea is to manipulate the connections between tokens in the multi-head attention via masking, where the networks are forced to exploit partial neighbors' information to produce a meaningful representation. The generality and effectiveness of TLM are thoroughly evaluated via extensive experiments on 4 diversified NLP tasks across 18 datasets, including natural language understanding benchmark GLUE, ChineseGLUE, Chinese Grammatical Error Correction, and data-to-text generation. The results indicate that TLM can consistently outperform attention dropout and DropHead, e.g., it increases by 0.5 points relative to DropHead with BERT-large on GLUE. Moreover, TLM can establish a new record on the data-to-text benchmark Rotowire (18.93 BLEU). Our code will be publicly available at https://github.com/Young1993/tlm.Comment: 13 pages. Accepted by EMNLP2023 main conferenc

Rethinking the Reference-based Distinctive Image Captioning

Distinctive Image Captioning (DIC) -- generating distinctive captions that describe the unique details of a target image -- has received considerable attention over the last few years. A recent DIC work proposes to generate distinctive captions by comparing the target image with a set of semantic-similar reference images, i.e., reference-based DIC (Ref-DIC). It aims to make the generated captions can tell apart the target and reference images. Unfortunately, reference images used by existing Ref-DIC works are easy to distinguish: these reference images only resemble the target image at scene-level and have few common objects, such that a Ref-DIC model can trivially generate distinctive captions even without considering the reference images. To ensure Ref-DIC models really perceive the unique objects (or attributes) in target images, we first propose two new Ref-DIC benchmarks. Specifically, we design a two-stage matching mechanism, which strictly controls the similarity between the target and reference images at object-/attribute- level (vs. scene-level). Secondly, to generate distinctive captions, we develop a strong Transformer-based Ref-DIC baseline, dubbed as TransDIC. It not only extracts visual features from the target image, but also encodes the differences between objects in the target and reference images. Finally, for more trustworthy benchmarking, we propose a new evaluation metric named DisCIDEr for Ref-DIC, which evaluates both the accuracy and distinctiveness of the generated captions. Experimental results demonstrate that our TransDIC can generate distinctive captions. Besides, it outperforms several state-of-the-art models on the two new benchmarks over different metrics.Comment: ACM MM 202