Dominican Republic

We propose a novel problem within end-to- end learning of task oriented dialogs (TOD), in which the dialog system mimics a troubleshooting agent who helps a user by diagnosing their problem (e.g., car not starting). Such dialogs are grounded in domain-specific flowcharts, which the agent is supposed to follow during the conversation. Our task exposes novel technical challenges for neural TOD, such as grounding an utterance to the flowchart without explicit annotation, referring to additional manual pages when user asks a clarification question, and ability to follow unseen flowcharts at test time. We release a dataset (FLODIAL) consisting of 2,738 dialogs grounded on 12 different troubleshooting flowcharts. We also design a neural model, FLONET, which uses a retrieval-augmented generation architecture to train the dialog agent. Our experiments find that FLONET can do zero-shot transfer to unseen flowcharts, and sets a strong baseline for future research.

EMNLP 2021

End-to-End Learning of Flowchart Grounded Task-Oriented Dialogs

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible. The experience for on-site participants would closely approximate a normal pre-COVID *ACL conference, with 5-6 thematically organized parallel sessions and live Q/A and interactive discussion immediately after the talks. Presentations by virtual participants will be equitably interleaved with those of on-site participants, projected on the auditorium screens as if on-site, and also followed immediately by live Q/A and interactive discussion at a time during reasonable waking hours for the virtual presenter. For all participants, on-site and virtual, who are unable to attend a session due to either time-zone issues or because they are participating in another session live, talk recordings and slides will be available online at a minimum after the live presentation (and in many cases before as well), and questions may be submitted in advance on session-specific discussion boards and answered live in session with the usual visual aids if desired.

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Registered attendees will receive access the week of November 1st.

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible.

technical paper

Deep reinforcement learning has shown great potential in training dialogue policies. However, its favorable performance comes at the cost of many rounds of interaction. Most of the existing dialogue policy methods rely on a single learning system, while the human brain has two specialized learning and memory systems, supporting to find good solutions without requiring copious examples. Inspired by the human brain, this paper proposes a novel complementary policy learning (CPL) framework, which exploits the complementary advantages of the episodic memory (EM) policy and the deep Q-network (DQN) policy to achieve fast and effective dialogue policy learning. In order to coordinate between the two policies, we proposed a confidence controller to control the complementary time according to their relative efficacy at different stages. Furthermore, memory connectivity and time pruning are proposed to guarantee the flexible and adaptive generalization of the EM policy in dialog tasks. Experimental results on three dialogue datasets show that our method significantly outperforms existing methods relying on a single learning system.

Efficient Dialogue Complementary Policy Learning via Deep Q-network Policy and Episodic Memory Policy

Although paths of user interests shift in knowledge graphs (KGs) can benefit conversational recommender systems (CRS), explicit reasoning on KGs has not been well considered in CRS, due to the complex of high-order and incomplete paths. We propose CRFR, which effectively does explicit multi-hop reasoning on KGs with a conversational context-based reinforcement learning model. Considering the incompleteness of KGs, instead of learning single complete reasoning path, CRFR flexibly learns multiple reasoning fragments which are likely contained in the complete paths of interests shift. A fragments-aware unified model is then designed to fuse the fragments information from item-oriented and concept-oriented KGs to enhance the CRS response with entities and words from the fragments. Extensive experiments demonstrate CRFR's SOTA performance on recommendation, conversation and conversation interpretability.

CRFR: Improving Conversational Recommender Systems via Flexible Fragments Reasoning on Knowledge Graphs

How can we generate concise explanations for multi-hop Reading Comprehension (RC)? The current strategies of identifying supporting sentences can be seen as an extractive question-focused summarization of the input text. However, these extractive explanations are not necessarily concise i.e. not minimally sufficient for answering a question. Instead, we advocate for an abstractive approach, where we propose to generate a question-focused, abstractive summary of input paragraphs and then feed it to an RC system. Given a limited amount of human-annotated abstractive explanations, we train the abstractive explainer in a semi-supervised manner, where we start from the supervised model and then train it further through trial and error maximizing a conciseness-promoted reward function. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed abstractive explainer can generate more compact explanations than an extractive explainer with limited supervision (only 2k instances) while maintaining sufficiency.

Summarize-then-Answer: Generating Concise Explanations for Multi-hop Reading Comprehension

It is often challenging to solve a complex problem from scratch, but much easier if we can access other similar problems with their solutions --- a paradigm known as case-based reasoning (CBR). We propose a neuro-symbolic CBR approach (\alg) for question answering over large knowledge bases. CBR-KBQA consists of a nonparametric memory that stores cases (question and logical forms) and a parametric model that can generate a logical form for a new question by retrieving cases that are relevant to it. On several KBQA datasets that contain complex questions, CBR-KBQA achieves competitive performance. For example, on the CWQ dataset, CBR-KBQA outperforms the current state of the art by 11\% on accuracy. Furthermore, we show that CBR-KBQA is capable of using new cases \emph{without} any further training: by incorporating a few human-labeled examples in the case memory, CBR-KBQA is able to successfully generate logical forms containing unseen KB entities as well as relations.

Case-based Reasoning for Natural Language Queries over Knowledge Bases

Many real-world problems require the com- bined application of multiple reasoning abilities—employing suitable abstractions, commonsense knowledge, and creative syn- thesis of problem-solving strategies. To help advance AI systems towards such capabilities, we propose a new reasoning challenge, namely Fermi Problems (FPs), which are questions whose answers can only be approximately estimated because their precise computation is either impractical or impossible. For example, “How much would the sea level rise if all ice in the world melted?” FPs are commonly used in quizzes and interviews to bring out and evaluate the creative reasoning abilities of humans. To do the same for AI systems, we present two datasets: 1) A collection of 1k real-world FPs sourced from quizzes and olympiads; and 2) a bank of 10k synthetic FPs of intermediate complexity to serve as a sandbox for the harder real-world challenge. In addition to question-answer pairs, the datasets contain detailed solutions in the form of an executable program and supporting facts, helping in supervision and evaluation of intermediate steps. We demonstrate that even extensively fine-tuned large-scale language models perform poorly on these datasets, on average making estimates that are off by two orders of magnitude. Our contribution is thus the crystallization of several unsolved AI problems into a single, new challenge that we hope will spur further advances in building systems that can reason.

How much coffee was consumed during EMNLP 2019? Fermi Problems: A New Reasoning Challenge for AI

In this paper we propose a novel approach towards improving the efficiency of Question Answering (QA) systems by filtering out questions that will not be answered by them. This is based on an interesting new finding: the answer confidence scores of state-of-the-art QA systems can be approximated well by models solely using the input question text. This enables preemptive filtering of questions that are not answered by the system due to their answer confidence scores being lower than the system threshold. Specifically, we learn Transformer-based question models by distilling Transformer-based answering models. Our experiments on three popular QA datasets and one industrial QA benchmark demonstrate the ability of our question models to approximate the Precision/Recall curves of the target QA system well. These question models, when used as filters, can effectively trade off lower computation cost of QA systems for lower Recall, e.g., reducing computation by ∼60%, while only losing ∼3−4% of Recall.

Will this Question be Answered? Question Filtering via Answer Model Distillation for Efficient Question Answering

**Abstract: ** While coreference resolution is defined independently of dataset domain, most models for performing coreference resolution do not transfer well to unseen domains. We consolidate a set of 8 coreference resolution datasets targeting different domains to evaluate the off-the-shelf performance of models. We then mix three datasets for training; even though their domain, annotation guidelines, and metadata differ, we propose a method for jointly training a single model on this heterogeneous data mixture by using data augmentation to account for annotation differences and sampling to balance the data quantities. We find that in a zero-shot setting, models trained on a single dataset transfer poorly while joint training yields improved overall performance, leading to better generalization in coreference resolution models. This work contributes a new benchmark for robust coreference resolution and multiple new state-of-the-art results.

On Generalization in Coreference Resolution

**Abstract:** Large annotated corpora for coreference resolution are available for few languages. For machine translation, however, strong black-box systems exist for many languages. We empirically explore the appealing idea of leveraging such translation tools for bootstrapping coreference resolution in languages with limited resources. Two scenarios are analyzed, in which a large coreference corpus in a high-resource language is used for coreference predictions in a smaller language, i.e., by machine translating either the training corpus or the test data. In our empirical evaluation of coreference resolution using the two scenarios on several medium-resource languages, we find no improvement over monolingual baseline models. Our analysis of the various sources of error inherent to the studied scenarios, reveals that in fact the quality of contemporary machine translation tools is the main limiting factor.

Lazy Low-Resource Coreference Resolution: a Study on Leveraging Black-Box Translation Tools

**Anthology link paper: **<br><br>
https://aclanthology.org/2021.crac-1.7.pdf

Automatic coreference resolution is understudied in Danish even though most of the Danish Dependency Treebank (Buch-Kromann, 2003) is annotated with coreference relations. This paper describes a conversion of its partial, yet well-documented, coreference relations into coreference clusters and the training and evaluation of coreference models on this data. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first publicly available, neural coreference models for Danish. We also present a new entity linking annotation on the dataset using WikiData identifiers, a named entity disambiguation (NED) dataset, and a larger automatically created NED dataset enabling wikily supervised NED models. The entity linking annotation is benchmarked using a state-of-the-art neural entity disambiguation model.

Resources and Evaluations for Danish Entity Resolution

Recent work has shown fine-tuning neural coreference models can produce strong performance when adapting to different domains. However, at the same time, this can require a large amount of annotated target examples. In this work, we focus on supervised domain adaptation for clinical notes, proposing the use of concept knowledge to more efficiently adapt coreference models to a new domain. We develop methods to improve the span representations via (1) a retrofitting loss to incentivize span representations to satisfy a knowledge-based distance function and (2) a scaffolding loss to guide the recovery of knowledge from the span representation. By integrating these losses, our model is able to improve our baseline precision and F-1 score. In particular, we show that incorporating knowledge with end-to-end coreference models results in better performance on the most challenging, domain-specific spans.

End-to-End Learning of Flowchart Grounded Task-Oriented Dialogs

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Efficient Dialogue Complementary Policy Learning via Deep Q-network Policy and Episodic Memory Policy

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