To diversify and enrich generated dialogue responses, knowledge-grounded dialogue has been investigated in recent years. The existing methods tackle the knowledge grounding challenge by retrieving the relevant sentences over a large corpus and augmenting the dialogues with explicit extra information. Despite their success, however, the existing works have drawbacks in inference efficiency. This paper proposes KnowExpert, a framework to bypass the explicit retrieval process and inject knowledge into the pre-trained language models with lightweight adapters and adapt to the knowledge-grounded dialogue task. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to tackle this challenge without retrieval in this task under an open-domain chit-chat scenario. The experimental results show that Knowexpert performs comparably with some retrieval-based baselines while being time-efficient in inference, demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed method.
Center for Artificial Intelligence Research (CAiRE)（人工智能研究中心（CAiRE））；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
Considerable progress has been made towards conversational models that generate coherent and fluent responses by training large language models on large dialogue datasets. These models have little or no control of the generated responses and miss two important features: continuous dialogue skills integration and seamlessly leveraging diverse knowledge sources. In this paper, we propose the Adapter-Bot, a dialogue model that uses a fixed backbone conversational model such as DialGPT (Zhang et al., 2019) and triggers on-demand dialogue skills (e.g., emphatic response, weather information, movie …
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）；Meituan（美团）；Microsoft Corporation（微软公司）；Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI)（北京人工智能研究院）
We study knowledge-grounded dialogue generation with pre-trained language models. To leverage the redundant external knowledge under capacity constraint, we propose equipping response generation defined by a pre-trained language model with a knowledge selection module, and an unsupervised approach to jointly optimizing knowledge selection and response generation with unlabeled dialogues. Empirical results on two benchmarks indicate that our model can significantly outperform state-of-the-art methods in both automatic evaluation and human judgment.
National Taiwan University（国立台湾大学）；Intel Labs（英特尔实验室）
With the power of large pretrained language models, various research works have integrated knowledge into dialogue systems. The traditional techniques treat knowledge as part of the input sequence for the dialogue system, prepending a set of knowledge statements in front of dialogue history. However, such a mechanism forces knowledge sets to be concatenated in an ordered manner, making models implicitly pay imbalanced attention to the sets during training. In this paper, we first investigate how the order of the knowledge set can influence autoregressive dialogue systems' responses. We conduct…
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…
Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学）；Salesforce Research Asia（Salesforce亚洲研究院）
Pre-trained language models have shown remarkable success in improving various downstream NLP tasks due to their ability to capture dependencies in textual data and generate natural responses. In this paper, we leverage the power of pre-trained language models for improving video-grounded dialogue, which is very challenging and involves complex features of different dynamics: (1) Video features which can extend across both spatial and temporal dimensions; and (2) Dialogue features which involve semantic dependencies over multiple dialogue turns. We propose a framework by extending GPT-2 models…
LinguaGame: A Linguistically Grounded Game-Theoretic Paradigm for Multi-Agent Dialogue Generation
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Peking University（北京大学）；East China University of Political Science and Law（中国政法大学）
A Video-grounded Dialogue Dataset and Metric for Event-driven Activities
National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST)（日本国立先进工业科学技术研究所（AIST））；Language Technologies Institute, Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学语言技术研究所）
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed with task-specific adapters catering to multiple downstream applications. In such a scenario, the additional compute associated with these apparently insignificant number of adapter parameters (typically less than 1% of the base model) turns out to be disproportionately significant during inference time (upto 2.5x times that of the base model). In this paper, we propose a new zero-latency fused low-rank adapter (zFLoRA) that introduces zero or negligible latency overhead on top of the base model. Experimental results on LLMs of size 1B, 3B…
MathDial: A Dialogue Tutoring Dataset with Rich Pedagogical Properties Grounded in Math Reasoning Problems
ETH AI Center（苏黎世联邦理工学院人工智能中心）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；TU Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）；Hessian Center for AI (hessian.AI)（黑森人工智能中心）；National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学国立教育学院）
Decision-Making with Deliberation: Meta-reviewing as a Document-grounded Dialogue
Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing Lab (UKP Lab), Department of Computer Science, Technical University of Darmstadt and National Research Center for Applied Cybersecurity ATHENE, Germany（技术大学达姆施塔特计算机科学系、应用网络安全国家研究中心ATHENE）；Data Science Group, University of Hamburg（汉堡大学数据科学组）
EiCAP: Beyond Fluency, Probing and Improving Emotional Intelligence in LLMs via Psychologically Grounded Multi-Turn Dialogue
Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI), Hamad Bin Khalifa University（卡塔尔计算研究所（QCRI），哈马德·本·卡伊夫大学）；University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
We study knowledge-grounded dialogue generation with pre-trained language models. Instead of pursuing new state-of-the-art on benchmarks, we try to understand if the knowledge stored in parameters of the pre-trained models is already enough to ground open domain dialogues, and thus allows us to get rid of the dependency on external knowledge sources in generation. Through extensive experiments on benchmarks, we find that by fine-tuning with a few dialogues containing knowledge, the pre-trained language models can outperform the state-of-the-art model that requires external knowledge in automat…
Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；Peking University（北京大学）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence（北京人工智能研究院）
Pre-trained models have achieved excellent performance on the dialogue task. However, for the continual increase of online chit-chat scenarios, directly fine-tuning these models for each of the new tasks not only explodes the capacity of the dialogue system on the embedded devices but also causes knowledge forgetting on pre-trained models and knowledge interference among diverse dialogue tasks. In this work, we propose a hierarchical inductive transfer framework to learn and deploy the dialogue skills continually and efficiently. First, we introduce the adapter module into pre-trained models f…
This paper proposes a novel task on commonsense-enhanced task-based dialogue grounded in documents and describes the Task2Dial dataset, a novel dataset of document-grounded task-based dialogues, where an Information Giver (IG) provides instructions (by consulting a document) to an Information Follower (IF), so that the latter can successfully complete the task. In this unique setting, the IF can ask clarification questions which may not be grounded in the underlying document and require commonsense knowledge to be answered. The Task2Dial dataset poses new challenges: (1) its human reference te…
The goal-oriented document-grounded dialogue aims at responding to the user query based on the dialogue context and supporting document. Existing studies tackle this problem by decomposing it into two sub-tasks: knowledge identification and response generation. However, such pipeline methods would unavoidably suffer from the error propagation issue. This paper proposes to unify these two sub-tasks via sequentially generating the grounding knowledge and the response. We further develop a prompt-connected multi-task learning strategy to model the characteristics and connections of different task…
Neural conversation models have shown great potentials towards generating fluent and informative responses by introducing external background knowledge. Nevertheless, it is laborious to construct such knowledge-grounded dialogues, and existing models usually perform poorly when transfer to new domains with limited training samples. Therefore, building a knowledge-grounded dialogue system under the low-resource setting is a still crucial issue. In this paper, we propose a novel three-stage learning framework based on weakly supervised learning which benefits from large scale ungrounded dialogue…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Samsung Research China - Beijing (SRC-B)（三星中国研究院北京分院）；NetEase Inc.（网易公司）
Grounded dialogue models generate responses that are grounded on certain concepts. Limited by the distribution of grounded dialogue data, models trained on such data face the transferability challenges in terms of the data distribution and the type of grounded concepts. To address the challenges, we propose the grounded minimal editing framework, which minimally edits existing responses to be grounded on the given concept. Focusing on personas, we propose Grounded Minimal Editor (GME), which learns to edit by disentangling and recombining persona-related and persona-agnostic parts of the respo…
Grounding dialogue system with external knowledge is a promising way to improve the quality of responses. Most existing works adopt knowledge graphs (KGs) as the external resources, paying attention to the contribution of entities in the last utterance of the dialogue for context understanding and response generation. Nevertheless, the correlations between knowledge implied in the multi-turn context and the transition regularities between relations in KGs are under-explored. To this end, we propose a Relation Transition aware Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Generation model (RT-KGD). Specifically,…
The University of Tokyo（东京大学）；Japan National Institute of Informatics（日本国家信息学研究所）；NII（信息学研究所（NII））
Recent models achieve promising results in visually grounded dialogues. However, existing datasets often contain undesirable biases and lack sophisticated linguistic analyses, which make it difficult to understand how well current models recognize their precise linguistic structures. To address this problem, we make two design choices: first, we focus on OneCommon Corpus \citep{udagawa2019natural,udagawa2020annotated}, a simple yet challenging common grounding dataset which contains minimal bias by design. Second, we analyze their linguistic structures based on \textit{spatial expressions} and…
University of California Santa Barbara（加州大学圣巴巴拉分校）；Alibaba DAMO Academy（阿里巴巴达摩院）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）
In this paper, we propose to formulate the task-oriented dialogue system as the purely natural language generation task, so as to fully leverage the large-scale pre-trained models like GPT-2 and simplify complicated delexicalization prepossessing. However, directly applying this method heavily suffers from the dialogue entity inconsistency caused by the removal of delexicalized tokens, as well as the catastrophic forgetting problem of the pre-trained model during fine-tuning, leading to unsatisfactory performance. To alleviate these problems, we design a novel GPT-Adapter-CopyNet network, whic…
Open-domain dialogue systems aim to generate relevant, informative and engaging responses. Seq2seq neural response generation approaches do not have explicit mechanisms to control the content or style of the generated response, and frequently result in uninformative utterances. In this paper, we propose using a dialogue policy to plan the content and style of target responses in the form of an action plan, which includes knowledge sentences related to the dialogue context, targeted dialogue acts, topic information, etc. The attributes within the action plan are obtained by automatically annota…
We introduce doc2dial, a new dataset of goal-oriented dialogues that are grounded in the associated documents. Inspired by how the authors compose documents for guiding end users, we first construct dialogue flows based on the content elements that corresponds to higher-level relations across text sections as well as lower-level relations between discourse units within a section. Then we present these dialogue flows to crowd contributors to create conversational utterances. The dataset includes about 4800 annotated conversations with an average of 14 turns that are grounded in over 480 documen…
Renmin University of China（中国人民大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
We present GLM-Dialog, a large-scale language model (LLM) with 10B parameters capable of knowledge-grounded conversation in Chinese using a search engine to access the Internet knowledge. GLM-Dialog offers a series of applicable techniques for exploiting various external knowledge including both helpful and noisy knowledge, enabling the creation of robust knowledge-grounded dialogue LLMs with limited proper datasets. To evaluate the GLM-Dialog more fairly, we also propose a novel evaluation method to allow humans to converse with multiple deployed bots simultaneously and compare their performa…
We propose MultiDoc2Dial, a new task and dataset on modeling goal-oriented dialogues grounded in multiple documents. Most previous works treat document-grounded dialogue modeling as a machine reading comprehension task based on a single given document or passage. In this work, we aim to address more realistic scenarios where a goal-oriented information-seeking conversation involves multiple topics, and hence is grounded on different documents. To facilitate such a task, we introduce a new dataset that contains dialogues grounded in multiple documents from four different domains. We also explor…
The pre-trained conversational models still fail to capture the implicit commonsense (CS) knowledge hidden in the dialogue interaction, even though they were pre-trained with an enormous dataset. In order to build a dialogue agent with CS capability, we firstly inject external knowledge into a pre-trained conversational model to establish basic commonsense through efficient Adapter tuning (Section 4). Secondly, we propose the ``two-way learning'' method to enable the bidirectional relationship between CS knowledge and sentence pairs so that the model can generate a sentence given the CS triple…
Indian Institute of Technology Patna（印度理工学院巴特那分校）；National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal（卡纳塔克国家理工学院苏拉特卡尔校区）
Grounding dialogue on external knowledge and interpreting linguistic patterns in dialogue history context, such as ellipsis, anaphora, and co-references is critical for dialogue comprehension and generation. In this paper, we present a novel open-domain dialogue generation model which effectively utilizes the large-scale commonsense and named entity based knowledge in addition to the unstructured topic-specific knowledge associated with each utterance. We enhance the commonsense knowledge with named entity-aware structures using co-references. Our proposed model utilizes a multi-hop attention …
Yonsei University（延世大学）；Seoul National University（首尔大学）
This paper introduces a simple yet effective data-centric approach for the task of improving persona-conditioned dialogue agents. Prior model-centric approaches unquestioningly depend on the raw crowdsourced benchmark datasets such as Persona-Chat. In contrast, we aim to fix annotation artifacts in benchmarking, which is orthogonally applicable to any dialogue model. Specifically, we augment relevant personas to improve dialogue dataset/agent, by leveraging the primal-dual structure of the two tasks, predicting dialogue responses and personas based on each other. Experiments on Persona-Chat sh…
While neural conversation models have shown great potentials towards generating informative and engaging responses via introducing external knowledge, learning such a model often requires knowledge-grounded dialogues that are difficult to obtain. To overcome the data challenge and reduce the cost of building a knowledge-grounded dialogue system, we explore the problem under a zero-resource setting by assuming no context-knowledge-response triples are needed for training. To this end, we propose representing the knowledge that bridges a context and a response and the way that the knowledge is e…
Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；ASAPP（ASAPP公司）；IBM Research AI（IBM人工智能研究院）
Collecting data for training dialog systems can be extremely expensive due to the involvement of human participants and need for extensive annotation. Especially in document-grounded dialog systems, human experts need to carefully read the unstructured documents to answer the users' questions. As a result, existing document-grounded dialog datasets are relatively small-scale and obstruct the effective training of dialogue systems. In this paper, we propose an automatic data augmentation technique grounded on documents through a generative dialogue model. The dialogue model consists of a user b…
VSTAR: A Video-grounded Dialogue Dataset for Situated Semantic Understanding with Scene and Topic Transitions
Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology, Peking University（北京大学王选计算机研究所）；Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence（北京通用人工智能研究院）；National Key Laboratory of General Artificial Intelligence（通用人工智能全国重点实验室）
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…
California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院）；University of California, Santa Barbara（加州大学圣巴巴拉分校）；University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）；Vector Institute（向量研究所）
A pressing challenge in current dialogue systems is to successfully converse with users on topics with information distributed across different modalities. Previous work in multiturn dialogue systems has primarily focused on either text or table information. In more realistic scenarios, having a joint understanding of both is critical as knowledge is typically distributed over both unstructured and structured forms. We present a new dialogue dataset, HybriDialogue, which consists of crowdsourced natural conversations grounded on both Wikipedia text and tables. The conversations are created thr…
