United Arab Emirates

This paper presents an ontology-aware pretrained language model (OPAL) for end-to-end task-oriented dialogue (TOD). Unlike chit-chat dialogue models, task-oriented dialogue models fulfill at least two task-specific modules: dialogue state tracker (DST) and response generator (RG). The dialogue state consists of the domain-slot-value triples, which are regarded as the user&#39;s constraints to search the domain-related databases. The large-scale task-oriented dialogue data with the annotated structured dialogue state usually are inaccessible. It prevents the development of the pretrained language model for the task-oriented dialogue. We propose a simple yet effective pretraining method to alleviate this problem, which consists of two pretraining phases. The first phase is to pretrain on large-scale contextual text data, where the structured information of the text is extracted by the information extracting tool. To bridge the gap between the pretraining method and downstream tasks, we design two pretraining tasks: ontology recovery and next-text generation, which simulates the DST and RG, respectively. The second phase is to fine-tune the pretrained model on the TOD data. The experimental results show that our proposed method achieves an exciting boost and get competitive performance even without any TOD data on CamRest676 and MultiWOZ benchmarks.

EMNLP 2022

OPAL: Ontology-Aware Pretrained Language Model for End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialogue

two-phase training

pretraining method

end-to-end task-oriented dialogue

This paper presents an ontology-aware pretrained language model (OPAL) for end-to-end task-oriented dialogue (TOD). Unlike chit-chat dialogue models, task-oriented dialogue models fulfill at least two task-specific modules: dialogue state tracker (DST) and response generator (RG). The dialogue state consists of the domain-slot-value triples, which are regarded as the user's constraints to search the domain-related databases. The large-scale task-oriented dialogue data with the annotated structured dialogue state usually are inaccessible. It prevents the development of the pretrained language model for the task-oriented dialogue. We propose a simple yet effective pretraining method to alleviate this problem, which consists of two pretraining phases. The first phase is to pretrain on large-scale contextual text data, where the structured information of the text is extracted by the information extracting tool. To bridge the gap between the pretraining method and downstream tasks, we design two pretraining tasks: ontology recovery and next-text generation, which simulates the DST and RG, respectively. The second phase is to fine-tune the pretrained model on the TOD data. The experimental results show that our proposed method achieves an exciting boost and get competitive performance even without any TOD data on CamRest676 and MultiWOZ benchmarks.

technical paper

## Welcome to EMNLP 2022!
I am delighted to welcome you to EMNLP 2022! I believe this conference has been complicated beyond any precedent. Over the past year, it’s been thrilling to see the organization team approach each new puzzle with creativity and enthusiasm. We hope that those participating in Abu Dhabi as well as those joining remotely will leave the conference feeling newly inspired by the program and newly connected to our ever-growing community. Following EMNLP 2021 and major NLP conferences since, EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid,” serving both virtual and in-person participants.

Our key innovations for EMNLP 2022 include:

* EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid” in a second sense, as well: we allowed both direct and rolling review paper submissions, building on the pilot experiment of EMNLP 2021, which considered a small number of ARR submissions. 
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* The first ACL-family conference in the United Arab Emirates.

 *Message from Noah A. Smith, University of Washington and Allen Institute for AI, Seattle, Washington, USA* 
***EMNLP 2022 General Chair***
 
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EMNLP 2022 will take place in Abu Dhabi from December 7th to December 11th, 2022. And it will be held in hybrid mode, both online and offline.

We present Camelira, a web-based Arabic multi-dialect morphological disambiguation tool that covers four major variants of Arabic: Modern Standard Arabic, Egyptian, Gulf, and Levantine. Camelira offers a user-friendly web interface that allows researchers and language learners to explore various linguistic information, such as part-of-speech, morphological features, and lemmas. Our system also provides an option to automatically choose an appropriate dialect-specific disambiguator based on the prediction of a dialect identification component. Camelira is publicly accessible at https://camelira.camel-lab.com.

Camelira: An Arabic Multi-Dialect Morphological Disambiguator

In this paper we present TweetNLP, an integrated platform for Natural Language Processing (NLP) in social media. TweetNLP supports a diverse set of NLP tasks, including generic focus areas such as sentiment analysis and named entity recognition, as well as social media-specific tasks such as emoji prediction and offensive language identification. Task-specific systems are powered by reasonably-sized Transformer-based language models specialized on social media text (in particular, Twitter) which can be run without the need for dedicated hardware or cloud services. The main contributions of TweetNLP are: (1) an integrated Python library for a modern toolkit supporting social media analysis using our various task-specific models adapted to the social domain; (2) an interactive online demo for codeless experimentation using our models; and (3) a tutorial covering a wide variety of typical social media applications.

TweetNLP: Cutting-Edge Natural Language Processing for Social Media

One key challenge in multi-document summarization is the generated summary is often less coherent compared to single document summarization due to the larger heterogeneity of the input source content. In this work, we propose a generic framework to jointly consider coherence and informativeness in multi-document summarization and offers provisions to replace individual components based on the domain of source text. In particular, the framework characterizes coherence through verb transitions and entity mentions and takes advantage of syntactic parse trees and neural modeling for intra-sentential noise pruning. The framework cast the entire problem as an integer linear programming optimization problem with neural and non-neural models as linear components. We evaluate our method in the news and legal domains. The proposed approach consistently performs better than competitive baselines for both objective metrics and human evaluation.

Tractable & Coherent Multi-Document Summarization: Discrete Optimization of Multiple Neural Modeling Streams via Integer Linear Programming

To improve deep learning models' robustness, adversarial training has been frequently used in computer vision with satisfying results. However, adversarial perturbation on text have turned out to be more challenging due to the discrete nature of text. The generated adversarial text might not sound natural or does not preserve semantics, which is the key for real world applications where text classification is based on semantic meaning. In this paper, we describe a new way for generating adversarial samples by using pseudo-labeled in-domain text data to train a seq2seq model for adversarial generation and combine it with paraphrase detection. We showcase the benefit of our approach for a real-world Natural Language Understanding (NLU) task, which maps a user's request to an intent. Furthermore, we experiment with gradient-based training for the NLU task and try using token importance scores to guide the adversarial text generation. We show that our approach can generate realistic and relevant adversarial samples compared to other state-of-the-art adversarial training methods. Applying adversarial training using these generated samples helps the NLU model to recover up to 70% of these types of errors and makes the model more robust, especially in the tail distribution in a large scale real world application.

Semi-supervised Adversarial Text Generation based on Seq2Seq models

Identifying the release of new products and their predicted demand in advance is highly valuable for E-Commerce marketplaces and retailers. The information of an upcoming product release is used for inventory management, marketing campaigns and pre-order suggestions. Often, the announcement of an upcoming product release is widely available in multiple web pages such as blogs, chats or news articles. However, to the best of our knowledge, an automatic system to extract future product releases from web data has not been presented. In this work we describe an ML-powered multi-stage pipeline to automatically identify future product releases and rank their predicted demand from unstructured pages across the whole web. Our pipeline includes a novel Longformer-based model which uses a global attention mechanism guided by pre-calculated Named Entity Recognition predictions related to product releases. The model training data is based on a new corpus of 30K web pages manually annotated to identify future product releases. We made the dataset openly available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6894770.

Is it out yet? Automatic Future Product Releases Extraction from Web Data

End-to-end automatic speech recognition systems represent the state of the art, but they rely on thousands of hours of manually annotated speech for training, as well as heavyweight computation for inference. Of course, this impedes commercialization since most companies lack vast human and computational resources. In this paper, we explore training and deploying an ASR system in the label-scarce, compute-limited setting. To reduce human labor, we use a third-party ASR system as a weak supervision source, supplemented with labeling functions derived from implicit user feedback. To accelerate inference, we propose to route production-time queries across a pool of CUDA graphs of varying input lengths, the distribution of which best matches the traffic's. Compared to our third-party ASR, we achieve a relative improvement in word-error rate of 8% and a speedup of 600%. Our system, called SpeechNet, currently serves 12 million queries per day on our voice-enabled smart television. To our knowledge, this is the first time a large-scale, Wav2vec-based deployment has been described in the academic literature.

SpeechNet: Weakly Supervised, End-to-End Speech Recognition at Industrial Scale

Conversational Question Answering (CQA) aims to answer questions contained within dialogues, which are not easily interpretable without context. Developing a model to rewrite conversational questions into self-contained ones is an emerging solution in industry settings as it allows using existing single-turn QA systems to avoid training a CQA model from scratch. Previous work trains rewriting models using human rewrites as supervision. However, such objectives are disconnected with QA models and therefore more human-like rewrites do not guarantee better QA performance. 

In this paper we propose using QA feedback to supervise the rewriting model with reinforcement learning. Experiments show that our approach can effectively improve QA performance over baselines for both extractive and retrieval QA. Furthermore, human evaluation shows that our method can generate more accurate and detailed rewrites when compared to human annotations.

Reinforced Question Rewriting for Conversational Question Answering

Unexpected responses or repeated clarification questions from conversational agents detract from the users' experience with technology meant to streamline their daily tasks. To reduce these frictions, Query Rewriting (QR) techniques replace transcripts of faulty queries with alternatives that lead to responses that
satisfy the users' needs. Despite their successes, existing QR approaches are limited in their ability to fix queries that require considering users' personal preferences.
We improve QR by proposing Personalized Adaptive Interactions Graph Encoder (PAIGE).
PAIGE is the first QR architecture that jointly models user's affinities and query semantics end-to-end.
The core idea is to represent previous user-agent interactions and world knowledge in a structured form --- a heterogeneous graph --- and apply message passing to propagate latent representations of users' affinities to refine utterance embeddings.
Using these embeddings, PAIGE can potentially provide different rewrites given the same query for users with different preferences. Our model, trained without any human-annotated data, improves the rewrite retrieval precision of state-of-the-art baselines by 12.5--17.5% while having nearly ten times fewer parameters.

PAIGE: Personalized Adaptive Interactions Graph Encoder for Query Rewriting in Dialogue Systems

Real-world business applications require a trade-off between language model performance and size. We propose a new method for model compression that relies on vocabulary transfer. We evaluate the method on various vertical domains and downstream tasks. Our results indicate that vocabulary transfer can be effectively used in combination with other compression techniques, yielding a significant reduction in model size and inference time while marginally compromising on performance.

Fast Vocabulary Transfer for Language Model Compression

Multi-modality support has become an integral part of creating a seamless user experience with modern voice assistants with smart displays. Users refer to images, video thumbnails, or the accompanying text descriptions on the screen through voice communication with AI powered devices. This raises the need to either augment existing commercial voice only dialogue systems with state-of-the-art multimodal components, or to introduce entirely new architectures; where the latter can lead to costly system revamps. To support the emerging visual navigation and visual product selection use cases, we propose to augment commercially deployed voice-only dialogue systems with additional multi-modal components. In this work, we present a novel yet pragmatic approach to expand an existing dialogue-based context carryover system (Chen et al., 2019a) in a voice assistant with state-of-the-art multimodal components to facilitate quick delivery of visual modality support with minimum changes. We demonstrate a 35% accuracy improvement over the existing system on an in-house multi-modal visual navigation data set.

OPAL: Ontology-Aware Pretrained Language Model for End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialogue

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Camelira: An Arabic Multi-Dialect Morphological Disambiguator

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OPAL: Ontology-Aware Pretrained Language Model for End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialogue

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Camelira: An Arabic Multi-Dialect Morphological Disambiguator

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PRESENTATIONS

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COMPANY

RESOURCES

Downloads