While neural models have been shown to exhibit strong performance on single-turn visual question answering (VQA) tasks, extending VQA to a multi-turn, conversational setting remains a challenge. One way to address this challenge is to augment existing strong neural VQA models with the mechanisms that allow them to retain information from previous dialog turns. One strong VQA model is the MAC network, which decomposes a task into a series of attention-based reasoning steps. However, since the MAC network is designed for single-turn question answering, it is not capable of referring to past dialog turns. More specifically, it struggles with tasks that require reasoning over the dialog history, particularly coreference resolution. We extend the MAC network architecture with Context-aware Attention and Memory (CAM), which attends over control states in past dialog turns to determine the necessary reasoning operations for the current question. MAC nets with CAM achieve up to 98.25% accuracy on the CLEVR-Dialog dataset, beating the existing state-of-the-art by 30% (absolute). Our error analysis indicates that with CAM, the model's performance particularly improved on questions that required coreference resolution.
Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学）；A*STAR, Institute for Infocomm Research（新加坡科技研究局资讯通信研究院）；Salesforce Research Asia（赛富时亚洲研究院）
Compared to traditional visual question answering, video-grounded dialogues require additional reasoning over dialogue context to answer questions in a multi-turn setting. Previous approaches to video-grounded dialogues mostly use dialogue context as a simple text input without modelling the inherent information flows at the turn level. In this paper, we propose a novel framework of Reasoning Paths in Dialogue Context (PDC). PDC model discovers information flows among dialogue turns through a semantic graph constructed based on lexical components in each question and answer. PDC model then lea…
Multi-Turn Multi-Agent Dialogue for Collaborative Reconstruction Improves VLM Performance on Spatial Reasoning, But Only Barely
Computational Linguistics, Department of Linguistics University of Potsdam（语言学计算系，语言学系 柏林洪堡大学）；German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)（德国人工智能研究中心（DFKI））
Language Technologies Institute, Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学语言技术研究所）；Computer Science Department, University of California, Davis（加利福尼亚大学戴维斯分校计算机科学系）
We study non-collaborative dialogs, where two agents have a conflict of interest but must strategically communicate to reach an agreement (e.g., negotiation). This setting poses new challenges for modeling dialog history because the dialog's outcome relies not only on the semantic intent, but also on tactics that convey the intent. We propose to model both semantic and tactic history using finite state transducers (FSTs). Unlike RNN, FSTs can explicitly represent dialog history through all the states traversed, facilitating interpretability of dialog structure. We train FSTs on a set of strate…
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；The University of Tokyo（东京大学）
In dialogue state tracking, dialogue history is a crucial material, and its utilization varies between different models. However, no matter how the dialogue history is used, each existing model uses its own consistent dialogue history during the entire state tracking process, regardless of which slot is updated. Apparently, it requires different dialogue history to update different slots in different turns. Therefore, using consistent dialogue contents may lead to insufficient or redundant information for different slots, which affects the overall performance. To address this problem, we devis…
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Alibaba-NTU Singapore Joint Research Institute（阿里巴巴-新加坡南洋理工大学联合研究院）；Joint NTU-UBC LILY Research Centre（南洋理工大学-不列颠哥伦比亚大学LILY联合研究中心）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；Shandong University（山东大学）
With the evolution of pre-trained language models, current open-domain dialogue systems have achieved great progress in conducting one-session conversations. In contrast, Multi-Session Conversation (MSC), which consists of multiple sessions over a long term with the same user, is under-investigated. In this paper, we propose History-Aware Hierarchical Transformer (HAHT) for multi-session open-domain dialogue. HAHT maintains a long-term memory of history conversations and utilizes history information to understand current conversation context and generate well-informed and context-relevant resp…
POSTECH（浦项科技大学）；Computer Science and Engineering（计算机科学与工程学院）；Graduate School of Artificial Intelligence（人工智能研究生院）
Task-oriented dialogue systems aim to help users achieve their goals in specific domains. Recent neural dialogue systems use the entire dialogue history for abundant contextual information accumulated over multiple conversational turns. However, the dialogue history becomes increasingly longer as the number of turns increases, thereby increasing memory usage and computational costs. In this paper, we present DoTS (Domain State Tracking for a Simplified Dialogue System), a task-oriented dialogue system that uses a simplified input context instead of the entire dialogue history. However, neglect…
Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology（王选计算机技术研究所）；Center for Data Science（数据科学中心）；Academy for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies（前沿交叉学科研究院）；Peking University（北京大学）；Soochow University（苏州大学）；Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence（高瓴人工智能学院）；Renmin University of China（中国人民大学）
Existing multi-turn context-response matching methods mainly concentrate on obtaining multi-level and multi-dimension representations and better interactions between context utterances and response. However, in real-place conversation scenarios, whether a response candidate is suitable not only counts on the given dialogue context but also other backgrounds, e.g., wording habits, user-specific dialogue history content. To fill the gap between these up-to-date methods and the real-world applications, we incorporate user-specific dialogue history into the response selection and propose a persona…
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Data Science Lab, JD.com（京东数据科学实验室）；Institute for AI Industry Research, Tsinghua University（清华大学人工智能产业研究院）
Despite the success of neural dialogue systems in achieving high performance on the leader-board, they cannot meet users' requirements in practice, due to their poor reasoning skills. The underlying reason is that most neural dialogue models only capture the syntactic and semantic information, but fail to model the logical consistency between the dialogue history and the generated response. Recently, a new multi-turn dialogue reasoning task has been proposed, to facilitate dialogue reasoning research. However, this task is challenging, because there are only slight differences between the illo…
Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）；Westlake University（西湖大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）
Non-task oriented dialogue systems have achieved great success in recent years due to largely accessible conversation data and the development of deep learning techniques. Given a context, current systems are able to yield a relevant and fluent response, but sometimes make logical mistakes because of weak reasoning capabilities. To facilitate the conversation reasoning research, we introduce MuTual, a novel dataset for Multi-Turn dialogue Reasoning, consisting of 8,860 manually annotated dialogues based on Chinese student English listening comprehension exams. Compared to previous benchmarks f…
The Ohio State University（俄亥俄州立大学）；IBM Research AI（IBM研究人工智能）
Dialog history plays an important role in spoken language understanding (SLU) performance in a dialog system. For end-to-end (E2E) SLU, previous work has used dialog history in text form, which makes the model dependent on a cascaded automatic speech recognizer (ASR). This rescinds the benefits of an E2E system which is intended to be compact and robust to ASR errors. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical conversation model that is capable of directly using dialog history in speech form, making it fully E2E. We also distill semantic knowledge from the available gold conversation transcripts…
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；Tencent Inc.（腾讯公司）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Visual Dialog is a vision-language task that requires an AI agent to engage in a conversation with humans grounded in an image. It remains a challenging task since it requires the agent to fully understand a given question before making an appropriate response not only from the textual dialog history, but also from the visually-grounded information. While previous models typically leverage single-hop reasoning or single-channel reasoning to deal with this complex multimodal reasoning task, which is intuitively insufficient. In this paper, we thus propose a novel and more powerful Dual-channel …
Google Assistant（谷歌助理）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）
Everyday conversations require understanding everyday events, which in turn, requires understanding temporal commonsense concepts interwoven with those events. Despite recent progress with massive pre-trained language models (LMs) such as T5 and GPT-3, their capability of temporal reasoning in dialogs remains largely under-explored. In this paper, we present the first study to investigate pre-trained LMs for their temporal reasoning capabilities in dialogs by introducing a new task and a crowd-sourced English challenge set, TIMEDIAL. We formulate TIME-DIAL as a multiple-choice cloze task with …
We present a novel end-to-end trainable neural network model for task-oriented dialog systems. The model is able to track dialog state, issue API calls to knowledge base (KB), and incorporate structured KB query results into system responses to successfully complete task-oriented dialogs. The proposed model produces well-structured system responses by jointly learning belief tracking and KB result processing conditioning on the dialog history. We evaluate the model in a restaurant search domain using a dataset that is converted from the second Dialog State Tracking Challenge (DSTC2) corpus. Ex…
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）；Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence（北京通用人工智能研究院）
We study video-grounded dialogue generation, where a response is generated based on the dialogue context and the associated video. The primary challenges of this task lie in (1) the difficulty of integrating video data into pre-trained language models (PLMs) which presents obstacles to exploiting the power of large-scale pre-training; and (2) the necessity of taking into account the complementarity of various modalities throughout the reasoning process. Although having made remarkable progress in video-grounded dialogue generation, existing methods still fall short when it comes to integrating…
We propose an end-to-end empathetic dialogue speech synthesis (DSS) model that considers both the linguistic and prosodic contexts of dialogue history. Empathy is the active attempt by humans to get inside the interlocutor in dialogue, and empathetic DSS is a technology to implement this act in spoken dialogue systems. Our model is conditioned by the history of linguistic and prosody features for predicting appropriate dialogue context. As such, it can be regarded as an extension of the conventional linguistic-feature-based dialogue history modeling. To train the empathetic DSS model effective…
End-to-end spoken language understanding (SLU) systems that process human-human or human-computer interactions are often context independent and process each turn of a conversation independently. Spoken conversations on the other hand, are very much context dependent, and dialog history contains useful information that can improve the processing of each conversational turn. In this paper, we investigate the importance of dialog history and how it can be effectively integrated into end-to-end SLU systems. While processing a spoken utterance, our proposed RNN transducer (RNN-T) based SLU model h…
Dialogue state tracking (DST) aims to predict the current dialogue state given the dialogue history. Existing methods generally exploit the utterances of all dialogue turns to assign value for each slot. This could lead to suboptimal results due to the information introduced from irrelevant utterances in the dialogue history, which may be useless and can even cause confusion. To address this problem, we propose LUNA, a sLot-tUrN Alignment enhanced approach. It first explicitly aligns each slot with its most relevant utterance, then further predicts the corresponding value based on this aligned…
Large end-to-end neural open-domain chatbots are becoming increasingly popular. However, research on building such chatbots has typically assumed that the user input is written in nature and it is not clear whether these chatbots would seamlessly integrate with automatic speech recognition (ASR) models to serve the speech modality. We aim to bring attention to this important question by empirically studying the effects of various types of synthetic and actual ASR hypotheses in the dialog history on TransferTransfo, a state-of-the-art Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) based neural open-d…
Peking University（北京大学）；Xiaomi AI Lab（小米AI实验室）；Renmin University of China（中国人民大学）；Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence（北京人工智能研究院）
In multi-turn dialog, utterances do not always take the full form of sentences \cite{Carbonell1983DiscoursePA}, which naturally makes understanding the dialog context more difficult. However, it is essential to fully grasp the dialog context to generate a reasonable response. Hence, in this paper, we propose to improve the response generation performance by examining the model's ability to answer a reading comprehension question, where the question is focused on the omitted information in the dialog. Enlightened by the multi-task learning scheme, we propose a joint framework that unifies these…
Visual dialog, which aims to hold a meaningful conversation with humans about a given image, is a challenging task that requires models to reason the complex dependencies among visual content, dialog history, and current questions. Graph neural networks are recently applied to model the implicit relations between objects in an image or dialog. However, they neglect the importance of 1) coreference relations among dialog history and dependency relations between words for the question representation; and 2) the representation of the image based on the fully represented question. Therefore, we pr…
University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute（澳大利亚人工智能研究所）；Centre for Frontier Artificial Intelligence Research（前沿人工智能研究中心）
The task of joint dialog sentiment classification (DSC) and act recognition (DAR) aims to simultaneously predict the sentiment label and act label for each utterance in a dialog. In this paper, we put forward a new framework which models the explicit dependencies via integrating \textit{prediction-level interactions} other than semantics-level interactions, more consistent with human intuition. Besides, we propose a speaker-aware temporal graph (SATG) and a dual-task relational temporal graph (DRTG) to introduce \textit{temporal relations} into dialog understanding and dual-task reasoning. To …
Visual Dialog involves "understanding" the dialog history (what has been discussed previously) and the current question (what is asked), in addition to grounding information in the image, to generate the correct response. In this paper, we show that co-attention models which explicitly encode dialog history outperform models that don't, achieving state-of-the-art performance (72 % NDCG on val set). However, we also expose shortcomings of the crowd-sourcing dataset collection procedure by showing that history is indeed only required for a small amount of the data and that the current evaluation…
It is essential for dialogue-based spatial reasoning systems to maintain memory of historical states of the world. In addition to conveying that the dialogue agent is mentally present and engaged with the task, referring to historical states may be crucial for enabling collaborative planning (e.g., for planning to return to a previous state, or diagnosing a past misstep). In this paper, we approach the problem of spatial memory in a multi-modal spoken dialogue system capable of answering questions about interaction history in a physical blocks world setting. This work builds upon a full spatia…
This work investigates the embeddings for representing dialog history in spoken language understanding (SLU) systems. We focus on the scenario when the semantic information is extracted directly from the speech signal by means of a single end-to-end neural network model. We proposed to integrate dialogue history into an end-to-end signal-to-concept SLU system. The dialog history is represented in the form of dialog history embedding vectors (so-called h-vectors) and is provided as an additional information to end-to-end SLU models in order to improve the system performance. Three following typ…
Mila（米拉）；Université de Montréal（蒙特利尔大学）；Google Research, Brain Team（谷歌研究大脑团队）；Element AI, Montréal（蒙特利尔Element AI）
Neural generative models have been become increasingly popular when building conversational agents. They offer flexibility, can be easily adapted to new domains, and require minimal domain engineering. A common criticism of these systems is that they seldom understand or use the available dialog history effectively. In this paper, we take an empirical approach to understanding how these models use the available dialog history by studying the sensitivity of the models to artificially introduced unnatural changes or perturbations to their context at test time. We experiment with 10 different typ…
Collaborative Rational Speech Act: Pragmatic Reasoning for Multi-Turn Dialog
International Laboratory on Learning Systems (ILLS)（国际学习系统实验室）；Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire des Sciences du Numérique (LISN)（跨学科数字科学实验室）；Mila - Quebec AI Institute（魁北克人工智能研究所）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；CentraleSupélec（中央超导研究所）；Université Paris-Saclay（巴黎萨克雷大学）；McGill University（麦吉尔大学）
Spoken language understanding (SLU) is an essential component in conversational systems. Considering that contexts provide informative cues for better understanding, history can be leveraged for contextual SLU. However, most prior work only paid attention to the related content in history utterances and ignored the temporal information. In dialogues, it is intuitive that the most recent utterances are more important than the least recent ones, and time-aware attention should be in a decaying manner. Therefore, this paper allows the model to automatically learn a time-decay attention function w…
Microsoft Dynamics 365 AI Research（微软Dynamics 365人工智能研究院）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）
This paper presents a new model for visual dialog, Recurrent Dual Attention Network (ReDAN), using multi-step reasoning to answer a series of questions about an image. In each question-answering turn of a dialog, ReDAN infers the answer progressively through multiple reasoning steps. In each step of the reasoning process, the semantic representation of the question is updated based on the image and the previous dialog history, and the recurrently-refined representation is used for further reasoning in the subsequent step. On the VisDial v1.0 dataset, the proposed ReDAN model achieves a new sta…
The visual dialog task requires an AI agent to interact with humans in multi-round dialogs based on a visual environment. As a common linguistic phenomenon, pronouns are often used in dialogs to improve the communication efficiency. As a result, resolving pronouns (i.e., grounding pronouns to the noun phrases they refer to) is an essential step towards understanding dialogs. In this paper, we propose VD-PCR, a novel framework to improve Visual Dialog understanding with Pronoun Coreference Resolution in both implicit and explicit ways. First, to implicitly help models understand pronouns, we de…
Many dialogue management frameworks allow the system designer to directly define belief rules to implement an efficient dialog policy. Because these rules are directly defined, the components are said to be hand-crafted. As dialogues become more complex, the number of states, transitions, and policy decisions becomes very large. To facilitate the dialog policy design process, we propose an approach to automatically learn belief rules using a supervised machine learning approach. We validate our ideas in Student-Advisor conversation domain, where we extract latent beliefs like student is curiou…
Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL)（三菱电机研究实验室）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
In previous work, we have proposed the Audio-Visual Scene-Aware Dialog (AVSD) task, collected an AVSD dataset, developed AVSD technologies, and hosted an AVSD challenge track at both the 7th and 8th Dialog System Technology Challenges (DSTC7, DSTC8). In these challenges, the best-performing systems relied heavily on human-generated descriptions of the video content, which were available in the datasets but would be unavailable in real-world applications. To promote further advancements for real-world applications, we proposed a third AVSD challenge, at DSTC10, with two modifications: 1) the hu…
A typical conversation comprises of multiple turns between participants where they go back-and-forth between different topics. At each user turn, dialogue state tracking (DST) aims to estimate user's goal by processing the current utterance. However, in many turns, users implicitly refer to the previous goal, necessitating the use of relevant dialogue history. Nonetheless, distinguishing relevant history is challenging and a popular method of using dialogue recency for that is inefficient. We, therefore, propose a novel framework for DST that identifies relevant historical context by referring…
The University of Melbourne（墨尔本大学）；Tencent（腾讯）；Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab（华为诺亚方舟实验室）
Conversations are always related to certain topics. However, it is challenging to fuse dialogue history and topic information from various sources at the same time in current dialogue generation models because of the input length limit of pre-trained language models (PLMs). In order to expand the information that PLMs can utilize, we encode topic and dialogue history information using certain prompts with multiple channels of Fusion-in-Decoder (FiD) and explore the influence of three different channel settings. In this paper, our experiments focus on a specific Chinese dataset named NaturalCon…
Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) is a key component of goal oriented dialogue systems that would parse user utterances into semantic frame representations. Traditionally SLU does not utilize the dialogue history beyond the previous system turn and contextual ambiguities are resolved by the downstream components. In this paper, we explore novel approaches for modeling dialogue context in a recurrent neural network (RNN) based language understanding system. We propose the Sequential Dialogue Encoder Network, that allows encoding context from the dialogue history in chronological order. We com…
Multi-turn dialogue modeling as a challenging branch of natural language understanding (NLU), aims to build representations for machines to understand human dialogues, which provides a solid foundation for multiple downstream tasks. Recent studies of dialogue modeling commonly employ pre-trained language models (PrLMs) to encode the dialogue history as successive tokens, which is insufficient in capturing the temporal characteristics of dialogues. Therefore, we propose Bidirectional Information Decoupling Network (BiDeN) as a universal dialogue encoder, which explicitly incorporates both the p…
Growing interests have been attracted in Conversational Recommender Systems (CRS), which explore user preference through conversational interactions in order to make appropriate recommendation. However, there is still a lack of ability in existing CRS to (1) traverse multiple reasoning paths over background knowledge to introduce relevant items and attributes, and (2) arrange selected entities appropriately under current system intents to control response generation. To address these issues, we propose CR-Walker in this paper, a model that performs tree-structured reasoning on a knowledge grap…
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校）
The Visual Dialog task requires a model to exploit both image and conversational context information to generate the next response to the dialogue. However, via manual analysis, we find that a large number of conversational questions can be answered by only looking at the image without any access to the context history, while others still need the conversation context to predict the correct answers. We demonstrate that due to this reason, previous joint-modality (history and image) models over-rely on and are more prone to memorizing the dialogue history (e.g., by extracting certain keywords o…
National Computer System Engineering Research Institute of China（中国国家计算机系统工程研究所）；Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Emotion Recognition in Conversations (ERC) has gained increasing attention for developing empathetic machines. Recently, many approaches have been devoted to perceiving conversational context by deep learning models. However, these approaches are insufficient in understanding the context due to lacking the ability to extract and integrate emotional clues. In this work, we propose novel Contextual Reasoning Networks (DialogueCRN) to fully understand the conversational context from a cognitive perspective. Inspired by the Cognitive Theory of Emotion, we design multi-turn reasoning modules to ext…
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Facebook AI Research（Facebook人工智能研究院）；Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）
Visual Dialog is a multimodal task of answering a sequence of questions grounded in an image, using the conversation history as context. It entails challenges in vision, language, reasoning, and grounding. However, studying these subtasks in isolation on large, real datasets is infeasible as it requires prohibitively-expensive complete annotation of the 'state' of all images and dialogs. We develop CLEVR-Dialog, a large diagnostic dataset for studying multi-round reasoning in visual dialog. Specifically, we construct a dialog grammar that is grounded in the scene graphs of the images from the …
Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学）；Institute for Infocomm Research, A*STAR（新加坡科技研究局资讯通信研究院）；Facebook（脸书）
A video-grounded dialogue system is required to understand both dialogue, which contains semantic dependencies from turn to turn, and video, which contains visual cues of spatial and temporal scene variations. Building such dialogue systems is a challenging problem, involving various reasoning types on both visual and language inputs. Existing benchmarks do not have enough annotations to thoroughly analyze dialogue systems and understand their capabilities and limitations in isolation. These benchmarks are also not explicitly designed to minimise biases that models can exploit without actual r…
In recent years, large pretrained models have been used in dialogue systems to improve successful task completion rates. However, lack of reasoning capabilities of dialogue platforms make it difficult to provide relevant and fluent responses, unless the designers of a conversational experience spend a considerable amount of time implementing these capabilities in external rule based modules. In this work, we propose a novel method to fine-tune pretrained transformer models such as Roberta and T5. to reason over a set of facts in a given dialogue context. Our method includes a synthetic data ge…
