Dominican Republic

Question answering (QA) models for reading comprehension have been demonstrated to exploit unintended dataset biases such as question--context lexical overlap.
This hinders QA models from generalizing to under-represented samples such as questions with low lexical overlap.
Question generation (QG), a method for augmenting QA datasets, can be a solution for such performance degradation if QG can properly debias QA datasets.
However, we discover that recent neural QG models are biased towards generating questions with high lexical overlap, which can amplify the dataset bias.
Moreover, our analysis reveals that data augmentation with these QG models frequently impairs the performance on questions with low lexical overlap, while improving that on questions with high lexical overlap.
To address this problem, we use a synonym replacement-based approach to augment questions with low lexical overlap.
We demonstrate that the proposed data augmentation approach is simple yet effective to mitigate the degradation problem with only 70k synthetic examples.

EMNLP 2021

Can Question Generation Debias Question Answering Models? A Case Study on Question–Context Lexical Overlap

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

workshop paper

Practical dialogue systems require robust methods of detecting out-of-scope (OOS) utterances to avoid conversational breakdowns and related failure modes. Directly training a model with labeled OOS examples yields reasonable performance, but obtaining such data is a resource-intensive process. To tackle this limited-data problem, previous methods focus on better modeling the distribution of in-scope (INS) examples. We introduce GOLD as an orthogonal technique that augments existing data to train better OOS detectors operating in low-data regimes. GOLD generates pseudo-labeled candidates using samples from an auxiliary dataset and keeps only the most beneficial candidates for training through a novel filtering mechanism. In experiments across three target benchmarks, the top GOLD model outperforms all existing methods on all key metrics: AUROC, AUPR, FPR@N. We also analyze the unique properties of OOS data to identify key factors for optimally applying our proposed method.

GOLD: Improving Out-of-Scope Detection in Dialogues using Data Augmentation

Dialogue disentanglement aims to group utterances in a long and multi-participant dialogue into threads. This is useful for discourse analysis and downstream applications such as dialogue response selection, where it can be the first step to construct a clean context/response set. Unfortunately, labeling all~\emph{reply-to} links takes quadratic effort w.r.t the number of utterances: an annotator must check all preceding utterances to identify the one to which the current utterance is a reply. In this paper, we are the first to propose a~\textbf{zero-shot} dialogue disentanglement solution. Firstly, we train a model on a multi-participant response selection dataset harvested from the web which is not annotated; we then apply the trained model to perform zero-shot dialogue disentanglement. Without any labeled data, our model can achieve a cluster F1 score of 25. We also fine-tune the model using various amounts of labeled data. Experiments show that with only 10\% of the data, we achieve nearly the same performance of using the full dataset\footnote{Code is released at \url{https://github.com/chijames/zero_shot_dialogue_disentanglement}}.

Zero-Shot Dialogue Disentanglement by Self-Supervised Entangled Response Selection

Neural dialog models are known to suffer from problems such as generating unsafe and inconsistent responses. Even though these problems are crucial and prevalent, they are mostly manually identified by model designers through interactions. Recently, some research instructs crowdworkers to goad the bots into triggering such problems. However, humans leverage superficial clues such as hate speech, while leaving systematic problems undercover. In this paper, we propose two methods including reinforcement learning to automatically trigger a dialog model into generating problematic responses. We show the effect of our methods in exposing safety and contradiction issues with state-of-the-art dialog models.

Automatically Exposing Problems with Neural Dialog Models

Next generation task-oriented dialog systems need to understand conversational contexts with their perceived surroundings, to effectively help users in the real-world multimodal environment. Existing task-oriented dialog datasets aimed towards virtual assistance fall short and do not situate the dialog in the user's multimodal context. To overcome, we present a new dataset for Situated and Interactive Multimodal Conversations, SIMMC 2.0, which includes 11K task-oriented user<>assistant dialogs (117K utterances) in the shopping domain, grounded in immersive and photo-realistic scenes. The dialogs are collected using a two-phase pipeline: (1) A novel multimodal dialog simulator generates simulated dialog flows, with an emphasis on diversity and richness of interactions, (2) Manual paraphrasing of the generated utterances to collect diverse referring expressions. We provide an in-depth analysis of the collected dataset, and describe in detail the four main benchmark tasks we propose. Our baseline model, powered by the state-of-the-art language model, shows promising results, and highlights new challenges and directions for the community to study. Code & data are made publicly available: https://github.com/facebookresearch/simmc2.

SIMMC 2.0: A Task-oriented Dialog Dataset for Immersive Multimodal Conversations

Reliable automatic evaluation of dialogue systems under an interactive environment has long been overdue. An ideal environment for evaluating dialog systems, also known as the Turing test, needs to involve human interaction, which is usually not affordable for large-scale experiments. Though researchers have attempted to use metrics (e.g., perplexity, BLEU) in language generation tasks or some model-based reinforcement learning methods (e.g., self-play evaluation) for automatic evaluation, these methods only show a very weak correlation with the actual human evaluation in practice. To bridge such a gap, we propose a new framework named ENIGMA for estimating human evaluation scores based on recent advances of off-policy evaluation in reinforcement learning. ENIGMA only requires a handful of pre-collected experience data, and therefore does not involve human interaction with the target policy during the evaluation, making automatic evaluations feasible. More importantly, ENIGMA is model-free and agnostic to the behavior policies for collecting the experience data, which significantly alleviates the technical difficulties of modeling complex dialogue environments and human behaviors. Our experiments show that ENIGMA significantly outperforms existing methods in terms of correlation with human evaluation scores.

Towards Automatic Evaluation of Dialog Systems: A Model-Free Off-Policy Evaluation Approach

An ideal integration of autonomous agents in a human world implies that they are able to collaborate on human terms. In particular, theory of mind plays an important role in maintaining common ground during human collaboration and communication. To enable theory of mind modeling in situated interactions, we introduce a fine-grained dataset of collaborative tasks performed by pairs of human subjects in the 3D virtual blocks world of Minecraft. It provides information that captures partners' beliefs of the world and of each other as an interaction unfolds, bringing abundant opportunities to study human collaborative behaviors in situated language communication. As a first step towards our goal of developing embodied AI agents able to infer belief states of collaborative partners in situ, we build and present results on computational models for several theory of mind tasks.

MindCraft: Theory of Mind Modeling for Situated Dialogue in Collaborative Tasks

In this work, we focus on a more challenging few-shot intent detection scenario where many intents are fine-grained and semantically similar. We present a simple yet effective few-shot intent detection schema via contrastive pre-training and fine-tuning. Specifically, we first conduct self-supervised contrastive pre-training on collected intent datasets, which implicitly learns to discriminate semantically similar utterances without using any labels. We then perform few-shot intent detection together with supervised contrastive learning, which explicitly pulls utterances from the same intent closer and pushes utterances across different intents farther. Experimental results show that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on three challenging intent detection datasets under 5-shot and 10-shot settings.

Few-Shot Intent Detection via Contrastive Pre-Training and Fine-Tuning

Language domains that require very careful use of terminology are abundant and reflect a significant part of the translation industry. In this work we introduce a benchmark for evaluating the quality and consistency of terminology translation, focusing on the medical (and COVID-19 specifically) domain for five language pairs: English to French, Chinese, Russian, and Korean, as well as Czech to German. We report the descriptions and results of the participating systems, commenting on the need for further research efforts towards both more adequate handling of terminologies as well as towards a proper formulation and evaluation of the task.

Findings of the WMT Shared Task on Machine Translation Using Terminologies

We report the results of the WMT 2021 shared task on Quality Estimation, where the challenge is to predict the quality of the output of neural machine translation systems at the word and sentence levels. This edition focused on two main novel additions: (i) prediction for unseen languages, i.e. zero-shot settings, and (ii) prediction of sentences with catastrophic errors. In addition, new data was released for a number of languages, especially post-edited data. Participating teams from 19 institutions submitted altogether 1263 systems to different task variants and language pairs.

Findings of the WMT 2021 Shared Task on Quality Estimation

Chatbots in healthcare can be used to collect information about the user with different purposes: treatment adherence, monitoring, patient support program, patient education, behavior change, diagnosis.
Considering monitoring, the task of filling clinical questionnaires (to measure quality of life for e.g.) in an automated way from a patient-machine dialogue received less attention. Although, it opens the opportunity to get updated patient's information more regularly for a closer monitoring.
The goal of this research is to study the task of automatically filling medical questionnaires based on conversation histories.
Due to the novelty of the task, lack of a relevant dataset and the difficulties of collecting data, we investigate the capabilities of state-of-the-art zero-shot models.

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Can Question Generation Debias Question Answering Models? A Case Study on Question–Context Lexical Overlap

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