Response generation for task-oriented dialogues implicitly optimizes two objectives at the same time: task completion and language quality. Conditioned response generation serves as an effective approach to separately and better optimize these two objectives. Such an approach relies on system action annotations which are expensive to obtain. To alleviate the need of action annotations, latent action learning is introduced to map each utterance to a latent representation. However, this approach is prone to over-dependence on the training data, and the generalization capability is thus restricted. To address this issue, we propose to learn natural language actions that represent utterances as a span of words. This explicit action representation promotes generalization via the compositional structure of language. It also enables an explainable generation process. Our proposed unsupervised approach learns a memory component to summarize system utterances into a short span of words. To further promote a compact action representation, we propose an auxiliary task that restores state annotations as the summarized dialogue context using the memory component. Our proposed approach outperforms latent action baselines on MultiWOZ, a benchmark multi-domain dataset.
Tell Me Why: Designing an Explainable LLM-based Dialogue System for Student Problem Behavior Diagnosis
School of Educational Technology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China（北京师范大学教育技术学院）；Advanced Innovation Center for Future Education, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China（北京师范大学未来教育创新中心）；Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China（香港大学教育学院）
ICAR-CNR（ICAR-CNR研究院）；University of Calabria（卡拉布里亚大学）；University of Bologna（博洛尼亚大学）
Dialogue systems are widely used in AI to support timely and interactive communication with users. We propose a general-purpose dialogue system architecture that leverages computational argumentation to perform reasoning and provide consistent and explainable answers. We illustrate the system using a COVID-19 vaccine information case study.
University of California, Santa Barbara（加州大学圣巴巴拉分校）；Amazon Alexa AI（亚马逊Alexa人工智能部门）
Users interacting with voice assistants today need to phrase their requests in a very specific manner to elicit an appropriate response. This limits the user experience, and is partly due to the lack of reasoning capabilities of dialogue platforms and the hand-crafted rules that require extensive labor. One possible way to improve user experience and relieve the manual efforts of designers is to build an end-to-end dialogue system that can do reasoning itself while perceiving user's utterances. In this work, we propose a novel method to incorporate the knowledge reasoning capability into dialo…
Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；University of California, Davis（加州大学戴维斯分校）；Intel Labs（英特尔实验室）
Complex conversation settings such as persuasion involve communicating changes in attitude or behavior, so users' perspectives need to be addressed, even when not directly related to the topic. In this work, we contribute a novel modular dialogue system framework that seamlessly integrates factual information and social content into persuasive dialogue. Our framework is generalizable to any dialogue tasks that have mixed social and task contents. We conducted a study that compared user evaluations of our framework versus a baseline end-to-end generation model. We found our framework was evalua…
Charles University, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics（查理大学数学与物理学院）
We present a novel architecture for explainable modeling of task-oriented dialogues with discrete latent variables to represent dialogue actions. Our model is based on variational recurrent neural networks (VRNN) and requires no explicit annotation of semantic information. Unlike previous works, our approach models the system and user turns separately and performs database query modeling, which makes the model applicable to task-oriented dialogues while producing easily interpretable action latent variables. We show that our model outperforms previous approaches with less supervision in terms …
Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics（南京航空航天大学）；Shandong University（山东大学）
Dialogue structure discovery is essential in dialogue generation. Well-structured topic flow can leverage background information and predict future topics to help generate controllable and explainable responses. However, most previous work focused on dialogue structure learning in task-oriented dialogue other than open-domain dialogue which is more complicated and challenging. In this paper, we present a new framework CTRLStruct for dialogue structure learning to effectively explore topic-level dialogue clusters as well as their transitions with unlabelled information. Precisely, dialogue utte…
Ping An Life Insurance of China, Ltd.（中国平安人寿保险股份有限公司）
Automatically and accurately identifying user intents and filling the associated slots from their spoken language are critical to the success of dialogue systems. Traditional methods require manually defining the DOMAIN-INTENT-SLOT schema and asking many domain experts to annotate the corresponding utterances, upon which neural models are trained. This procedure brings the challenges of information sharing hindering, out-of-schema, or data sparsity in open-domain dialogue systems. To tackle these challenges, we explore a new task of {\em automatic intent-slot induction} and propose a novel dom…
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence（矢量人工智能研究所）；Unity Health Toronto（多伦多统一健康）
We introduce Doctor XAvIer, a BERT-based diagnostic system that extracts relevant clinical data from transcribed patient-doctor dialogues and explains predictions using feature attribution methods. We present a novel performance plot and evaluation metric for feature attribution methods: Feature Attribution Dropping (FAD) curve and its Normalized Area Under the Curve (N-AUC). FAD curve analysis shows that integrated gradients outperforms Shapley values in explaining diagnosis classification. Doctor XAvIer outperforms the baseline with 0.97 F1-score in named entity recognition and symptom perti…
Microsoft Corporation（微软公司）；Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）
We study open domain dialogue generation with dialogue acts designed to explain how people engage in social chat. To imitate human behavior, we propose managing the flow of human-machine interactions with the dialogue acts as policies. The policies and response generation are jointly learned from human-human conversations, and the former is further optimized with a reinforcement learning approach. With the dialogue acts, we achieve significant improvement over state-of-the-art methods on response quality for given contexts and dialogue length in both machine-machine simulation and human-machin…
University of Kentucky（肯塔基大学）；University of Central Florida（中佛罗里达大学）
Task-oriented dialog systems enable users to accomplish tasks using natural language. State-of-the-art systems respond to users in the same way regardless of their personalities, although personalizing dialogues can lead to higher levels of adoption and better user experiences. Building personalized dialog systems is an important, yet challenging endeavor and only a handful of works took on the challenge. Most existing works rely on supervised learning approaches and require laborious and expensive labeled training data for each user profile. Additionally, collecting and labeling data for each…
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；New York University（纽约大学）；Intapp Inc.（Intapp公司）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
The development of Open-Domain Dialogue Systems (ODS)is a trending topic due to the large number of research challenges, large societal and business impact, and advances in the underlying technology. However, the development of these kinds of systems requires two important characteristics:1) automatic evaluation mechanisms that show high correlations with human judgements across multiple dialogue evaluation aspects (with explainable features for providing constructive and explicit feedback on the quality of generative models' responses for quick development and deployment)and 2) mechanisms tha…
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Meituan Group（美团集团）
The most advanced abstractive dialogue summarizers lack generalization ability on new domains and the existing researches for domain adaptation in summarization generally rely on large-scale pre-trainings. To explore the lightweight fine-tuning methods for domain adaptation of dialogue summarization, in this paper, we propose an efficient and generalizable Domain-Oriented Prefix-tuning model, which utilizes a domain word initialized prefix module to alleviate domain entanglement and adopts discrete prompts to guide the model to focus on key contents of dialogues and enhance model generalizatio…
Capital One - Conversation Research（第一资本 - 对话研究）；Capital One - Center for Machine Learning（第一资本 - 机器学习中心）
Task oriented dialogue (TOD) requires the complex interleaving of a number of individually controllable components with strong guarantees for explainability and verifiability. This has made it difficult to adopt the multi-turn multi-domain dialogue generation capabilities of streamlined end-to-end open-domain dialogue systems. In this paper, we present a new framework, DLGNet-Task, a unified task-oriented dialogue system which employs autoregressive transformer networks such as DLGNet and GPT-2/3 to complete user tasks in multi-turn multi-domain conversations. Our framework enjoys the controll…
This paper propose to combine pretrained language models with the modular dialogue paradigm for open-domain dialogue modeling. Our method, semantic-enhanced finetuning, instantiates conversation understanding, planning, and response generation as a language model finetuning task. At inference, we disentangle semantic and token variations by specifying sampling methods and constraints for each module separately. For training and evaluation, we present X-Weibo, a Chinese multi-turn open-domain dialogue dataset with automatic annotation for emotions, DAs, and topical words. Experiments show that …
German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)（德国人工智能研究中心（DFKI））；Technische Universität Berlin（柏林工业大学）
The human-centric explainable artificial intelligence (HCXAI) community has raised the need for framing the explanation process as a conversation between human and machine. In this position paper, we establish desiderata for Mediators, text-based conversational agents which are capable of explaining the behavior of neural models interactively using natural language. From the perspective of natural language processing (NLP) research, we engineer a blueprint of such a Mediator for the task of sentiment analysis and assess how far along current research is on the path towards dialogue-based expla…
Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology, Peking University（北京大学王选计算机研究所）；Center for Data Science, AAIS, Peking University（北京大学人工智能研究院数据科学中心）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）；Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence, Renmin University of China（中国人民大学高瓴人工智能学院）；Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence（北京通用人工智能研究院）
With the availability of massive general-domain dialogue data, pre-trained dialogue generation appears to be super appealing to transfer knowledge from the general domain to downstream applications. In most existing work, such transferable ability is mainly obtained by fitting a large model with hundreds of millions of parameters on massive data in an exhaustive way, leading to inefficient running and poor interpretability. This paper proposes a novel dialogue generation model with a latent structure that is easily transferable from the general domain to downstream tasks in a lightweight and t…
The uptake of deep learning in natural language generation (NLG) led to the release of both small and relatively large parallel corpora for training neural models. The existing data-to-text datasets are, however, aimed at task-oriented dialogue systems, and often thus limited in diversity and versatility. They are typically crowdsourced, with much of the noise left in them. Moreover, current neural NLG models do not take full advantage of large training data, and due to their strong generalizing properties produce sentences that look template-like regardless. We therefore present a new corpus …
Investigating Co-Constructive Behavior of Large Language Models in Explanation Dialogues
Leibniz University Hannover, Institute of Artificial Intelligence（汉诺威莱布尼茨大学人工智能研究所）；LMU Munich, MCML（慕尼黑大学MCML）；Paderborn University（帕德博恩大学）；Bielefeld University, CITEC（比勒菲尔德大学CITEC）
PRISM2: Unlocking Multi-Modal General Pathology AI with Clinical Dialogue
Paige, NYC, NY United States（美国纽约市帕伊公司）；Microsoft Research, Cambridge, MA United States（微软研究院）；Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, NYC, NY United States（纪念斯隆凯特林癌症中心）；University of Yale, New Haven, CT United States（耶鲁大学）
Microsoft Corporation（微软公司）；Institute of Computer Science and Technology, Peking University（北京大学计算机科学技术研究所）
We present open domain response generation with meta-words. A meta-word is a structured record that describes various attributes of a response, and thus allows us to explicitly model the one-to-many relationship within open domain dialogues and perform response generation in an explainable and controllable manner. To incorporate meta-words into generation, we enhance the sequence-to-sequence architecture with a goal tracking memory network that formalizes meta-word expression as a goal and manages the generation process to achieve the goal with a state memory panel and a state controller. Expe…
