The detection of offensive language in the context of a dialogue has become an increasingly important application of natural language processing. The detection of trolls in public forums (Galán-García et al., 2016), and the deployment of chatbots in the public domain (Wolf et al., 2017) are two examples that show the necessity of guarding against adversarially offensive behavior on the part of humans. In this work, we develop a training scheme for a model to become robust to such human attacks by an iterative build it, break it, fix it strategy with humans and models in the loop. In detailed experiments we show this approach is considerably more robust than previous systems. Further, we show that offensive language used within a conversation critically depends on the dialogue context, and cannot be viewed as a single sentence offensive detection task as in most previous work. Our newly collected tasks and methods will be made open source and publicly available.
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Vector Institute（矢量研究所）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）
Building user trust in dialogue agents requires smooth and consistent dialogue exchanges. However, agents can easily lose conversational context and generate irrelevant utterances. These situations are called dialogue breakdown, where agent utterances prevent users from continuing the conversation. Building systems to detect dialogue breakdown allows agents to recover appropriately or avoid breakdown entirely. In this paper we investigate the use of semi-supervised learning methods to improve dialogue breakdown detection, including continued pre-training on the Reddit dataset and a manifold-ba…
Even though machine learning has become the major scene in dialogue research community, the real breakthrough has been blocked by the scale of data available. To address this fundamental obstacle, we introduce the Multi-Domain Wizard-of-Oz dataset (MultiWOZ), a fully-labeled collection of human-human written conversations spanning over multiple domains and topics. At a size of $10$k dialogues, it is at least one order of magnitude larger than all previous annotated task-oriented corpora. The contribution of this work apart from the open-sourced dataset labelled with dialogue belief states and …
Recent open-domain dialogue models have brought numerous breakthroughs. However, building a chat system is not scalable since it often requires a considerable volume of human-human dialogue data, especially when enforcing features such as persona, style, or safety. In this work, we study the challenge of imposing roles on open-domain dialogue systems, with the goal of making the systems maintain consistent roles while conversing naturally with humans. To accomplish this, the system must satisfy a role specification that includes certain conditions on the stated features as well as a system pol…
University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence（艾伦人工智能研究所）
Collecting and annotating task-oriented dialogues is time-consuming and costly; thus, zero and few shot learning could greatly benefit dialogue state tracking (DST). In this work, we propose an in-context learning (ICL) framework for zero-shot and few-shot learning DST, where a large pre-trained language model (LM) takes a test instance and a few exemplars as input, and directly decodes the dialogue state without any parameter updates. To better leverage a tabular domain description in the LM prompt, we reformulate DST into a text-to-SQL problem. We also propose a novel approach to retrieve an…
A Survey of the Evolution of Language Model-Based Dialogue Systems: Data, Task and Models
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Huawei Noah Ark Lab（华为诺亚实验室）；MoE Key Laboratory of High Confidence Software Technologies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong（高可信软件技术重点实验室，香港中文大学）
Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf（杜塞尔多夫海因里希·海涅大学）
Goal oriented dialogue systems were originally designed as a natural language interface to a fixed data-set of entities that users might inquire about, further described by domain, slots, and values. As we move towards adaptable dialogue systems where knowledge about domains, slots, and values may change, there is an increasing need to automatically extract these terms from raw dialogues or related non-dialogue data on a large scale. In this paper, we take an important step in this direction by exploring different features that can enable systems to discover realizations of domains, slots, and…
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 …
Heriot-Watt University（赫瑞瓦特大学）；School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences（数学与计算机科学学院）
Conversational User Interface (CUI) has become ubiquitous in everyday life, in consumer-focused products like Siri and Alexa or business-oriented solutions. Deep learning underlies many recent breakthroughs in dialogue systems but requires very large amounts of training data, often annotated by experts. Trained with smaller data, these methods end up severely lacking robustness (e.g. to disfluencies and out-of-domain input), and often just have too little generalisation power. In this thesis, we address the above issues by introducing a series of methods for training robust dialogue systems fr…
We present Sparrow, an information-seeking dialogue agent trained to be more helpful, correct, and harmless compared to prompted language model baselines. We use reinforcement learning from human feedback to train our models with two new additions to help human raters judge agent behaviour. First, to make our agent more helpful and harmless, we break down the requirements for good dialogue into natural language rules the agent should follow, and ask raters about each rule separately. We demonstrate that this breakdown enables us to collect more targeted human judgements of agent behaviour and …
This paper investigates pre-trained language models to find out which model intrinsically carries the most informative representation for task-oriented dialogue tasks. We approach the problem from two aspects: supervised classifier probe and unsupervised mutual information probe. We fine-tune a feed-forward layer as the classifier probe on top of a fixed pre-trained language model with annotated labels in a supervised way. Meanwhile, we propose an unsupervised mutual information probe to evaluate the mutual dependence between a real clustering and a representation clustering. The goals of this…
University of California, Santa Barbara（加州大学圣塔芭芭拉分校）；Tencent（腾讯）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
Neural conversational models have long suffered from the problem of inconsistency and lacking coherent personality. To address the issue, persona-based models capturing individual characteristics have been proposed, but they still face the dilemma of model adaption and data privacy. To break this dilemma, we propose a novel Federated Natural Language Generation (FedNLG) framework, which learns personalized representations from various dataset on distributed devices, and thus implements the personalized dialogue system efficiently and safely. FedNLG first pre-trains parameters of standard neura…
SDARE-Bench: Evaluating Large Language Models on Conversational Stigma Detection and Response in Dyadic and Group Dialogue
Monash University（莫纳什大学）；University of Liverpool（利物浦大学）；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；Federation University（联邦大学）；Orygen, The University of Melbourne（墨尔本大学下属Orygen机构）
Benchmarks Underestimate the Readiness of Multi-lingual Dialogue Agents
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Université Paris-Saclay（巴黎-萨克雷大学）；CEA（法国原子能和替代能源委员会）；Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）；International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad（海得拉巴国际信息技术学院）；Hanyang University（汉阳大学）；Tianjin University（天津大学）
University of California, Santa Barbara（加州大学圣巴巴拉分校）
To reduce the toxic degeneration in a pretrained Language Model (LM), previous work on Language Model detoxification has focused on reducing the toxicity of the generation itself (self-toxicity) without consideration of the context. As a result, a type of implicit offensive language where the generations support the offensive language in the context is ignored. Different from the LM controlling tasks in previous work, where the desired attributes are fixed for generation, the desired stance of the generation depends on the offensiveness of the context. Therefore, we propose a novel control met…
Curiosity as Linguistic Intervention: Using LLM Tutoring Dialogues to Influence Exploratory Learning Behavior
School of Computing and Information Systems, Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学计算与信息系统学院）；Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学人机交互研究所）
The Image Reconstruction Game: Drawing Common Ground Through Iterative Multimodal Dialogue
Computational Linguistics, Department of Linguistics University of Potsdam（波恩大学语言学系计算语言学部）；German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Berlin（德国人工智能研究中心（DFKI）柏林）
University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）
Understanding audio-visual content and the ability to have an informative conversation about it have both been challenging areas for intelligent systems. The Audio Visual Scene-aware Dialog (AVSD) challenge, organized as a track of the Dialog System Technology Challenge 7 (DSTC7), proposes a combined task, where a system has to answer questions pertaining to a video given a dialogue with previous question-answer pairs and the video itself. We propose for this task a hierarchical encoder-decoder model which computes a multi-modal embedding of the dialogue context. It first embeds the dialogue h…
We consider repair tasks: given a critic (e.g., compiler) that assesses the quality of an input, the goal is to train a fixer that converts a bad example (e.g., code with syntax errors) into a good one (e.g., code with no syntax errors). Existing works create training data consisting of (bad, good) pairs by corrupting good examples using heuristics (e.g., dropping tokens). However, fixers trained on this synthetically-generated data do not extrapolate well to the real distribution of bad inputs. To bridge this gap, we propose a new training approach, Break-It-Fix-It (BIFI), which has two key i…
Amazon Alexa AI（亚马逊 Alexa AI）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）；University of Michigan（密歇根大学）
Robots operating in human spaces must be able to engage in natural language interaction with people, both understanding and executing instructions, and using conversation to resolve ambiguity and recover from mistakes. To study this, we introduce TEACh, a dataset of over 3,000 human--human, interactive dialogues to complete household tasks in simulation. A Commander with access to oracle information about a task communicates in natural language with a Follower. The Follower navigates through and interacts with the environment to complete tasks varying in complexity from "Make Coffee" to "Prepa…
