United States

Collaborative tasks are ubiquitous activities where a form of communication is required in order to reach a joint goal. Collaborative building is one of such tasks. We wish to develop an intelligent builder agent in a simulated building environment (Minecraft) that can build whatever users wish to build by just talking to the agent. In order to achieve this goal, such agents need to be able to take the initiative by asking clarification questions when further information is needed. Existing works on Minecraft Corpus Dataset only learn to execute instructions neglecting the importance of asking for clarifications. In this paper, we extend the Minecraft Corpus Dataset by annotating all builder utterances into eight types, including clarification questions, and propose a new builder agent model capable of determining when to ask or execute instructions. Experimental results show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on the collaborative building task with a substantial improvement. We also define two new tasks, the learning to ask task and the joint learning task. The latter consists of solving both collaborating building and learning to ask tasks jointly.

NAACL 2022

Learning to Execute Actions or Ask Clarification Questions

video question answering

## Welcome to NAACL 2022!
The Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) is taking place July 10-15, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Seattle, WA and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to conference! 
 
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, keynote presentations, a plenary panel on the place of linguistics and symbolic structures in NLP, and an Industrial Track panel on Careers in NLP.
 
Posters (including Findings of NAACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop and will have an oral session and a poster session.
 
The program also features 6 Tutorials and 26 Workshops.
 
 We wish you a wonderful conference!
 
[The NAACL 2022 Organizing Committee](https://2022.naacl.org/committees/organization/)

2022 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

poster

We present NLU++, a novel dataset for natural language understanding (NLU) in task-oriented dialogue (ToD) systems, with the aim to provide a much more challenging evaluation environment for dialogue NLU models, up to date with the current application and industry requirements. NLU++ is divided into two domains (BANKING and HOTELS) and brings several crucial improvements over current commonly used NLU datasets. 1) NLU++ provides fine-grained domain ontologies with a large set of challenging multi-intent sentences combined with finer-grained and thus more challenging slot sets. 2) The ontology is divided into domain-specific and generic (i.e., domain-universal) intents that overlap across domains, promoting cross-domain reusability of annotated examples. 3) The dataset design has been inspired by the problems observed in industrial ToD systems, and 4) it has been collected, filtered and carefully annotated by dialogue NLU experts, yielding high-quality annotated data. Finally, we benchmark a series of current state-of-the-art NLU models on NLU++; the results demonstrate the challenging nature of the dataset, especially in low-data regimes, and call for further research on ToD NLU.

NLU++: A Multi-Label, Slot-Rich, Generalisable Dataset for Natural Language Understanding in Task-Oriented Dialogue

Identifying all possible user intents for a dialog system at design time is challenging even for skilled domain experts. For practical applications, novel intents may have to be inferred incrementally on the fly. This typically entails repeated retraining of the intent detector on both the existing and novel intents which can be expensive and would require storage of all past data corresponding to prior intents. In this paper, the objective is to continually train an intent detector on new intents while maintaining performance on prior intents without mandating access to prior intent data. Several data replay-based approaches have been introduced to avoid catastrophic forgetting during continual learning, including exemplar and generative replay. Current generative replay approaches struggle to generate representative samples because the generation is conditioned solely on the class/task label. Motivated by the recent work around prompt-based generation via pre-trained language models (PLMs),  we employ generative replay using PLMs for incremental intent detection. Unlike exemplar replay, we only store the relevant contexts per intent in memory and use these stored contexts (with the class label) as prompts for generating intent-specific utterances. We use a common model for both generation and classification to promote optimal sharing of knowledge across both tasks. To further improve generation, we employ supervised contrastive fine-tuning of the PLM. Our proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) for lifelong intent detection on four public datasets and even outperforms exemplar replay-based approaches. The technique also achieves SOTA on a lifelong relation extraction task, suggesting that the approach is extendable to other continual learning tasks beyond intent detection.

Prompt Augmented Generative Replay via Supervised Contrastive Learning for Lifelong Intent Detection

A dialogue policy module is an essential part of task-completion dialogue systems. Recently, increasing interest has focused on reinforcement learning (RL)-based dialogue policy. Its favorable performance and wise action decisions rely on an accurate estimation of action values. The overestimation problem is a widely known issue of RL since its estimate of the maximum action value is larger than the ground truth, which results in an unstable learning process and suboptimal policy. This problem is detrimental to RL-based dialogue policy learning. To mitigate this problem, this paper proposes a dynamic partial average estimator (DPAV) of the ground truth maximum action value. DPAV calculates the partial average between the predicted maximum action value and minimum action value, where the weights are dynamically adaptive and problem-dependent. We incorporate DPAV into a deep Q-network as the dialogue policy and show that our method can achieve better or comparable results compared to top baselines on three dialogue datasets of different domains with a lower computational load. In addition, we also theoretically prove the convergence and derive the upper and lower bounds of the bias compared with those of other methods.

Anti-Overestimation Dialogue Policy Learning for Task-Completion Dialogue System

While conversational semantic role labeling (CSRL) has shown its usefulness on Chinese conversational tasks, it is still under-explored in non-Chinese languages due to the lack of multilingual CSRL annotations for the parser training. To avoid expensive data collection and error-propagation of translation-based methods, we present a simple but effective approach to perform zero-shot cross-lingual CSRL.
Our model implicitly learns language-agnostic, conversational structure-aware and semantically rich representations with the hierarchical encoders and elaborately designed pre-training objectives. Experimental results show that our model outperforms all baselines by large margins on two newly collected English CSRL test sets. More importantly, we confirm the usefulness of CSRL to non-Chinese conversational tasks such as the question-in-context rewriting task in English and the multi-turn dialogue response generation tasks in English, German and Japanese by incorporating the CSRL information into the downstream conversation-based models. We believe this finding is significant and will facilitate the research of non-Chinese dialogue tasks which suffer the problems of ellipsis and anaphora.

Zero-shot Cross-lingual Conversational Semantic Role Labeling

Event detection is a classic natural language processing task. However, the constantly emerging new events make supervised methods not applicable to unseen types. Previous zero-shot event detection methods either require predefined event types as heuristic rules or resort to external semantic analyzing tools. To overcome this weakness, we propose an end-to-end framework named Zero-Shot Event Detection Based on Ordered Contrastive Learning and Prompt-Based Prediction (ZEOP). By creatively introducing multiple contrastive samples with ordered similarities, the encoder can learn event representations from both instance-level and class-level, which makes the distinctions between different unseen types more significant. Meanwhile, we utilize the prompt-based prediction to identify trigger words without relying on external resources. Experiments demonstrate that our model detects events more effectively and accurately than state-of-the-art methods.

Zero-Shot Event Detection Based on Ordered Contrastive Learning and Prompt-Based Prediction

Zero-shot relation extraction aims to identify novel relations which cannot be observed at the training stage. However, it still faces some challenges since the unseen relations of instances are similar or the input sentences have similar entities, the unseen relation representations from different categories tend to overlap and lead to errors. In this paper, we propose a novel Relation Contrastive Learning framework (RCL) to mitigate above two types of similar problems: Similar Relations and Similar Entities. By jointly optimizing a contrastive instance loss with a relation classification loss on seen relations, RCL can learn subtle difference between instances and achieve better separation between different relation categories in the representation space simultaneously. Especially in contrastive instance learning, the dropout noise as data augmentation is adopted to amplify the semantic difference between similar instances without breaking relation representation, so as to promote model to learn more effective representations. Experiments conducted on two well-known datasets show that RCL can signiﬁcantly outperform previous state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, if the seen relations are insufficient, RCL can also obtain comparable results with the model trained on the full training set, showing the robustness of our approach.

RCL: Relation Contrastive Learning for Zero-Shot Relation Extraction

Open relation extraction is the task to extract relational facts without pre-defined relation types from open-domain corpora. However, since there are some hard or semi-hard instances sharing similar context and entity information but belonging to different underlying relation, current OpenRE methods always cluster them into the same relation type. In this paper, we propose a novel method based on Instance Ranking and Label Calibration strategies (IRLC) to learn discriminative representations for open relation extraction. Due to lacking the original instance label, we provide three surrogate strategies to generate the positive, hard negative, and semi-hard negative instances for the original instance. Instance ranking aims to refine the relational feature space by pushing the hard and semi-hard negative instances apart from the original instance with different margins and pulling the original instance and its positive instance together. To refine the cluster probability distributions of these instances, we introduce a label calibration strategy to model the constraint relationship between instances. Experimental results on two public datasets demonstrate that our proposed method can signiﬁcantly outperform the previous state-of-the-art methods.

Learning Discriminative Representations for Open Relation Extraction with Instance Ranking and Label Calibration

Cross-domain named entity recognition (NER) aims to borrow the entity information from the source domain to help the entity recognition in the target domain with limited labeled data. Despite the promising performance of existing approaches, most of them focus on reducing the discrepancy of token representation between source and target domains, while the transfer of the valuable label information is often not explicitly considered or even ignored. Therefore, we propose a novel autoregressive framework to advance cross-domain NER by first enhancing the relationship between labels and tokens and then further improving the transferability of label information. Specifically, we associate each label with an embedding vector, and for each token, we utilize a bidirectional LSTM (Bi-LSTM) to encode the labels of its previous tokens for modeling internal context information and label dependence. Afterward, we propose a Bi-Attention module that merges the token representation from a pre-trained model and the label features from the Bi-LSTM as the label-aware information, which is concatenated to the token representation to facilitate cross-domain NER. In doing so, label information contained in the embedding vectors can be effectively transferred to the target domain, and Bi-LSTM can further model the label relationship among different domains by pre-train and then fine-tune setting. Experimental results on several datasets confirm the effectiveness of our model, where our model achieves significant improvements over the state of the arts.

A Label-Aware Autoregressive Framework for Cross-Domain NER

Temporal Expression Extraction (TEE) is essential for understanding time in natural language. It has applications in Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks such as question answering, information retrieval, and causal inference. To date, work in this area has mostly focused on English as there is a scarcity of labeled data for other languages. We propose XLTime, a novel framework for multilingual TEE. XLTime works on top of pre-trained language models and leverages multi-task learning to prompt cross-language knowledge transfer both from English and within the non-English languages. XLTime alleviates problems caused by a shortage of data in the target language. We apply XLTime with different language models and show that it outperforms the previous automatic SOTA methods on French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Basque, by large margins. XLTime also closes the gap considerably on the handcrafted HeidelTime method.

XLTime: A Cross-Lingual Knowledge Transfer Framework for Temporal Expression Extraction

Recent years have witnessed the improving performance of Chinese Named Entity Recognition (NER) from proposing new frameworks or incorporating word lexicons.  However, the inner composition of entity mentions in character-level Chinese NER has been rarely studied. Actually, most mentions of regular types have strong name regularity. For example, entities end with indicator words such as "公司 (company) ” or “银行 (bank)” usually belong to organization. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective method for investigating the regularity of entity spans in Chinese NER, dubbed as Regularity-Inspired reCOgnition Network (RICON). Specifically, the proposed model consists of two branches: a regularity-aware module and a regularity-agnostic module. The regularity-aware module captures the internal regularity of each span for better entity type prediction, while the regularity-agnostic module is employed to locate the boundary of entities and relieve the excessive attention to span regularity. An orthogonality space is further constructed to encourage two modules to extract different aspects of regularity features. To verify the effectiveness of our method, we conduct extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets and a practical medical dataset. The experimental results show that our RICON significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods, including various lexicon-based methods.

Learning to Execute Actions or Ask Clarification Questions

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NLU++: A Multi-Label, Slot-Rich, Generalisable Dataset for Natural Language Understanding in Task-Oriented Dialogue

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