We describe an architecture for spoken dialogue interfaces to semi-autonomous systems that transforms speech signals through successive representations of linguistic, dialogue, and domain knowledge. Each step produces an output, and a meta-output describing the transformation, with an executable program in a simple scripting language as the final result. The output/meta-output distinction permits perspicuous treatment of diverse tasks such as resolving pronouns, correcting user misconceptions, and optimizing scripts.
Taiwan International Graduate Program（台湾国际研究生学程）；National Tsing Hua University（台湾清华大学）；Academia Sinica（中央研究院）
We present an overview of the EmotionX 2019 Challenge, held at the 7th International Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Social Media (SocialNLP), in conjunction with IJCAI 2019. The challenge entailed predicting emotions in spoken and chat-based dialogues using augmented EmotionLines datasets. EmotionLines contains two distinct datasets: the first includes excerpts from a US-based TV sitcom episode scripts (Friends) and the second contains online chats (EmotionPush). A total of thirty-six teams registered to participate in the challenge. Eleven of the teams successfully submitted thei…
We present a novel approach to generating scripts by using agents with different personality types. To manage character interaction in the script, we employ simulated dramatic networks. Automatic and human evaluation on multiple criteria shows that our approach outperforms a vanilla-GPT2-based baseline. We further introduce a new metric to evaluate dialogue consistency based on natural language inference and demonstrate its validity.
Université de Montréal（蒙特利尔大学）；Microsoft XiaoIce（微软小冰）；Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence, Renmin University of China（中国人民大学高瓴人工智能学院）；Beijing Film Academy（北京电影学院）
It is appealing to have a system that generates a story or scripts automatically from a story-line, even though this is still out of our reach. In dialogue systems, it would also be useful to drive dialogues by a dialogue plan. In this paper, we address a key problem involved in these applications -- guiding a dialogue by a narrative. The proposed model ScriptWriter selects the best response among the candidates that fit the context as well as the given narrative. It keeps track of what in the narrative has been said and what is to be said. A narrative plays a different role than the context (…
Center for Artificial Intelligence Research (CAiRE)（人工智能研究中心（CAiRE））；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
In order to offer a customized script tool and inspire professional scriptwriters, we present VScript. It is a controllable pipeline that generates complete scripts, including dialogues and scene descriptions, as well as presents visually using video retrieval. With an interactive interface, our system allows users to select genres and input starting words that control the theme and development of the generated script. We adopt a hierarchical structure, which first generates the plot, then the script and its visual presentation. A novel approach is also introduced to plot-guided dialogue gener…
In this paper, we use a large-scale play scripts dataset to propose the novel task of theatrical cue generation from dialogues. Using over one million lines of dialogue and cues, we approach the problem of cue generation as a controlled text generation task, and show how cues can be used to enhance the impact of dialogue using a language model conditioned on a dialogue/cue discriminator. In addition, we explore the use of topic keywords and emotions for controlled text generation. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments show that language models can be successfully used to generate …
We describe an architecture for implementing spoken natural language dialogue interfaces to semi-autonomous systems, in which the central idea is to transform the input speech signal through successive levels of representation corresponding roughly to linguistic knowledge, dialogue knowledge, and domain knowledge. The final representation is an executable program in a simple scripting language equivalent to a subset of Cshell. At each stage of the translation process, an input is transformed into an output, producing as a byproduct a "meta-output" which describes the nature of the transformati…
Indian Institute of Technology Bombay（印度理工学院孟买分校）；Accenture Labs（埃森哲实验室）
Movies reflect society and also hold power to transform opinions. Social biases and stereotypes present in movies can cause extensive damage due to their reach. These biases are not always found to be the need of storyline but can creep in as the author's bias. Movie production houses would prefer to ascertain that the bias present in a script is the story's demand. Today, when deep learning models can give human-level accuracy in multiple tasks, having an AI solution to identify the biases present in the script at the writing stage can help them avoid the inconvenience of stalled release, law…
Knowledge graph-based dialogue systems are capable of generating more informative responses and can implement sophisticated reasoning mechanisms. However, these models do not take into account the sparseness and incompleteness of knowledge graph (KG)and current dialogue models cannot be applied to dynamic KG. This paper proposes a dynamic Knowledge graph-based dialogue generation method with improved adversarial Meta-Learning (KDAD). KDAD formulates dynamic knowledge triples as a problem of adversarial attack and incorporates the objective of quickly adapting to dynamic knowledge-aware dialogu…
Knowledge graph-based dialogue systems can narrow down knowledge candidates for generating informative and diverse responses with the use of prior information, e.g., triple attributes or graph paths. However, most current knowledge graph (KG) cover incomplete domain-specific knowledge. To overcome this drawback, we propose a knowledge graph based proactive dialogue generation model (KgDg) with three components, improved model-agnostic meta-learning algorithm (MAML), knowledge selection in knowledge triplets embedding, and knowledge aware proactive response generator. For knowledge triplets emb…
INESC-ID Lisboa（里斯本INESC-ID（里斯本信息与决策系统研究所））；Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa（里斯本大学高等技术学院）；Heriot-Watt University（赫瑞-瓦特大学）
Current generative-based dialogue systems are data-hungry and fail to adapt to new unseen domains when only a small amount of target data is available. Additionally, in real-world applications, most domains are underrepresented, so there is a need to create a system capable of generalizing to these domains using minimal data. In this paper, we propose a method that adapts to unseen domains by combining both transfer and meta-learning (DATML). DATML improves the previous state-of-the-art dialogue model, DiKTNet, by introducing a different learning technique: meta-learning. We use Reptile, a fir…
University College London（伦敦大学学院）；University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Uppsala University（乌普萨拉大学）；Affiniti AI（Affiniti人工智能公司）
Existing dialogue datasets contain lots of noise in their state annotations. Such noise can hurt model training and ultimately lead to poor generalization performance. A general framework named ASSIST has recently been proposed to train robust dialogue state tracking (DST) models. It introduces an auxiliary model to generate pseudo labels for the noisy training set. These pseudo labels are combined with vanilla labels by a common fixed weighting parameter to train the primary DST model. Notwithstanding the improvements of ASSIST on DST, tuning the weighting parameter is challenging. Moreover, …
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）
Dialogue State Tracking (DST) forms a core component of automated chatbot based systems designed for specific goals like hotel, taxi reservation, tourist information, etc. With the increasing need to deploy such systems in new domains, solving the problem of zero/few-shot DST has become necessary. There has been a rising trend for learning to transfer knowledge from resource-rich domains to unknown domains with minimal need for additional data. In this work, we explore the merits of meta-learning algorithms for this transfer and hence, propose a meta-learner D-REPTILE specific to the DST probl…
IIT Kharagpur（印度理工学院克勒格布尔分校）；IBM Research India（IBM印度研究院）；IBM India Research Lab（IBM印度研究实验室）
Despite the tremendous success of neural dialogue models in recent years, it suffers a lack of relevance, diversity, and some times coherence in generated responses. Lately, transformer-based models, such as GPT-2, have revolutionized the landscape of dialogue generation by capturing the long-range structures through language modeling. Though these models have exhibited excellent language coherence, they often lack relevance and terms when used for domain-specific response generation. In this paper, we present DSRNet (Domain Specific Response Network), a transformer-based model for dialogue re…
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）
Existing personalized dialogue models use human designed persona descriptions to improve dialogue consistency. Collecting such descriptions from existing dialogues is expensive and requires hand-crafted feature designs. In this paper, we propose to extend Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML)(Finn et al., 2017) to personalized dialogue learning without using any persona descriptions. Our model learns to quickly adapt to new personas by leveraging only a few dialogue samples collected from the same user, which is fundamentally different from conditioning the response on the persona descriptions. …
Before the Script, Set the Stage: How Worldview Simulation Amplifies Psychologically Grounded Persuasion in Multi-Turn Jailbreaking
AI4S Center, Shanghai Qi Zhi Institute（上海期智研究院AI4S中心）；College of AI, Tsinghua University（清华大学人工智能学院）；Fangcun AI（方寸人工智能）；Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences, Tsinghua University（清华大学交叉信息研究院）
School of Informatics（信息学院）；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；Microsoft Cognitive Services Research（微软认知服务研究院）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）
Dialog policy determines the next-step actions for agents and hence is central to a dialogue system. However, when migrated to novel domains with little data, a policy model can fail to adapt due to insufficient interactions with the new environment. We propose Deep Transferable Q-Network (DTQN) to utilize shareable low-level signals between domains, such as dialogue acts and slots. We decompose the state and action representation space into feature subspaces corresponding to these low-level components to facilitate cross-domain knowledge transfer. Furthermore, we embed DTQN in a meta-learning…
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Institute for Infocomm Research A*STAR（新加坡科技研究局资讯通信研究院）
Conventional approaches to personalized dialogue generation typically require a large corpus, as well as predefined persona information. However, in a real-world setting, neither a large corpus of training data nor persona information are readily available. To address these practical limitations, we propose a novel multi-task meta-learning approach which involves training a model to adapt to new personas without relying on a large corpus, or on any predefined persona information. Instead, the model is tasked with generating personalized responses based on only the dialogue context. Unlike prio…
École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)（洛桑联邦理工学院）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Hangzhou Dianzi University（杭州电子科技大学）
Natural language generation (NLG) is an essential component of task-oriented dialogue systems. Despite the recent success of neural approaches for NLG, they are typically developed for particular domains with rich annotated training examples. In this paper, we study NLG in a low-resource setting to generate sentences in new scenarios with handful training examples. We formulate the problem from a meta-learning perspective, and propose a generalized optimization-based approach (Meta-NLG) based on the well-recognized model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML) algorithm. Meta-NLG defines a set of meta t…
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；Salesforce Research（Salesforce研究院）；DarkMatter AI Inc.（DarkMatter人工智能公司）；Tencent Jarvis Lab（腾讯Jarvis实验室）
Human doctors with well-structured medical knowledge can diagnose a disease merely via a few conversations with patients about symptoms. In contrast, existing knowledge-grounded dialogue systems often require a large number of dialogue instances to learn as they fail to capture the correlations between different diseases and neglect the diagnostic experience shared among them. To address this issue, we propose a more natural and practical paradigm, i.e., low-resource medical dialogue generation, which can transfer the diagnostic experience from source diseases to target ones with a handful of …
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）
Sentence function is an important linguistic feature indicating the communicative purpose in uttering a sentence. Incorporating sentence functions into conversations has shown improvements in the quality of generated responses. However, the number of utterances for different types of fine-grained sentence functions is extremely imbalanced. Besides a small number of high-resource sentence functions, a large portion of sentence functions is infrequent. Consequently, dialogue generation conditioned on these infrequent sentence functions suffers from data deficiency. In this paper, we investigate …
