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This ability to learn consecutive tasks without forgetting how to perform previously trained problems is essential for developing an online dialogue system. This paper proposes an effective continual learning method for the task-oriented dialogue system with iterative network pruning, expanding, and masking (TPEM), which preserves performance on previously encountered tasks while accelerating learning progress on subsequent tasks. Specifically, TPEM (i) leverages network pruning to keep the knowledge for old tasks, (ii) adopts network expanding to create free weights for new tasks, and (iii) introduces task-specific network masking to alleviate the negative impact of fixed weights of old tasks on new tasks. We conduct extensive experiments on seven different tasks from three benchmark datasets and show empirically that TPEM leads to significantly improved results over the strong competitors.

ACL-IJCNLP 2021

Continual Learning for Task-oriented Dialogue System with Iterative Network Pruning, Expanding and Masking

task-oriented dialogue system

network pruning

continual learning

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COLING 2022

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

technical paper

**Welcome to ACL-IJCNLP 2021!**

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The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

he Neural Machine Translation (NMT) model is essentially a joint language model conditioned on both the source sentence and partial translation. Therefore, the NMT model naturally involves the mechanism of the Language Model (LM) that predicts the next token only based on partial translation. Despite its success, NMT still suffers from the hallucination problem, generating fluent but inadequate translations. The main reason is that NMT pays excessive attention to the partial translation while neglecting the source sentence to some extent, namely overconfidence of the LM. Accordingly, we define the Margin between the NMT and the LM, calculated by subtracting the predicted probability of the LM from that of the NMT model for each token. The Margin is negatively correlated to the overconfidence degree of the LM. Based on the property, we propose a Margin-based Token-level Objective (MTO) and a Margin-based Sentence-level Objective (MSO) to maximize the Margin for preventing the LM from being overconfident. Experiments on WMT14 English-to-German, WMT19 Chinese-to-English, and WMT14 English-to-French translation tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, with 1.36, 1.50, and 0.63 BLEU improvements, respectively, compared to the Transformer baseline. The human evaluation further verifies that our approaches improve translation adequacy as well as fluency.

Prevent the Language Model from being Overconfident in Neural Machine Translation

Recently, token-level adaptive training has achieved promising improvement in machine translation, where the cross-entropy loss function is adjusted by assigning different training weights to different tokens, in order to alleviate the token imbalance problem. However, previous approaches only use static word frequency information in the target language without considering the source language, which is insufficient for bilingual tasks like machine translation. In this paper, we propose a novel bilingual mutual information (BMI) based adaptive objective, which measures the learning difficulty for each target token from the perspective of bilingualism, and assigns an adaptive weight accordingly to improve token-level adaptive training. This method assigns larger training weights to tokens with higher BMI, so that easy tokens are updated with coarse granularity while difficult tokens are updated with fine granularity. Experimental results on WMT14 English-to-German and WMT19 Chinese-to-English demonstrate the superiority of our approach compared with the Transformer baseline and previous token-level adaptive training approaches. Further analyses confirm that our method can improve the lexical diversity.

Bilingual Mutual Information Based Adaptive Training for Neural Machine Translation

Emotional support is a crucial ability for many conversation scenarios, including social interactions, mental health support, and customer service chats. Following reasonable procedures and using various support skills can help to effectively provide support. However, due to the lack of a well-designed task and corpora of effective emotional support conversations, research on building emotional support into dialog systems remains lacking. In this paper, we define the Emotional Support Conversation (ESC) task and propose an ESC Framework, which is grounded on the Helping Skills Theory. We construct an Emotion Support Conversation dataset (ESConv) with rich annotation (especially support strategy) in a help-seeker and supporter mode. To ensure a corpus of high-quality conversations that provide examples of effective emotional support, we take extensive effort to design training tutorials for supporters and several mechanisms for quality control during data collection. Finally, we evaluate state-of-the-art dialog models with respect to the ability to provide emotional support. Our results show the importance of support strategies in providing effective emotional support and the utility of ESConv in training more emotional support systems.

Towards Emotional Support Dialog Systems

Existing slot filling models can only recognize pre-defined in-domain slot types from a limited slot set. In the practical application, a reliable dialogue system should know what it does not know. In this paper, we introduce a new task, Novel Slot Detection (NSD), in the task-oriented dialogue system. NSD aims to discover unknown or out-of-domain slot types to strengthen the capability of a dialogue system based on in-domain training data. Besides, we construct two public NSD datasets, propose several strong NSD baselines, and establish a benchmark for future work. Finally, we conduct exhaustive experiments and qualitative analysis to comprehend key challenges and provide new guidance for future directions.

Novel Slot Detection: A Benchmark for Discovering Unknown Slot Types in the Task-Oriented Dialogue System

Generating some appealing questions in open-domain conversations is an effective way to improve human-machine interactions and lead the topic to a broader or deeper direction. To avoid dull or deviated questions, some researchers tried to utilize answer, the "future" information, to guide question generation. However, they separate a post-question-answer (PQA) triple into two parts: post-question (PQ) and question-answer (QA) pairs, which may hurt the overall coherence. Besides, the QA relationship is modeled as a one-to-one mapping that is not reasonable in open-domain conversations. To tackle these problems, we propose a generative triple-wise model with hierarchical variations for open-domain conversational question generation (CQG). Latent variables in three hierarchies are used to represent the shared background of a triple and one-to-many semantic mappings in both PQ and QA pairs. Experimental results on a large-scale CQG dataset show that our method significantly improves the quality of questions in terms of fluency, coherence and diversity over competitive baselines.

GTM: A Generative Triple-wise Model for Conversational Question Generation

Neural dialogue generation models trained with the one-hot target distribution suffer from the over-confidence issue, which leads to poor generation diversity as widely reported in the literature. Although existing approaches such as label smoothing can alleviate this issue, they fail to adapt to diverse dialog contexts. In this paper, we propose an Adaptive Label Smoothing (AdaLabel) approach that can adaptively estimate a target label distribution at each time step for different contexts. The maximum probability in the predicted distribution is used to modify the soft target distribution produced by a novel light-weight bi-directional decoder module. The resulting target distribution is aware of both previous and future contexts and is adjusted to avoid over-training the dialogue model. Our model can be trained in an endto-end manner. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets show that our approach outperforms various competitive baselines in producing diverse responses.

Diversifying Dialog Generation via Adaptive Label Smoothing

Out-of-scope intent detection is of practical importance in task-oriented dialogue systems. Since the distribution of outlier utterances is arbitrary and unknown in the training stage, existing methods commonly rely on strong assumptions on data distribution such as mixture of Gaussians to make inference, resulting in either complex multi-step training procedures or hand-crafted rules such as confidence threshold selection for outlier detection. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective method to train an out-of-scope intent classifier in a fully end-to-end manner by simulating the test scenario in training, which requires no assumption on data distribution and no additional post-processing or threshold setting. Specifically, we construct a set of pseudo outliers in the training stage, by generating synthetic outliers using inliner features via self-supervision and sampling out-of-scope sentences from easily available open-domain datasets. The pseudo outliers are used to train a discriminative classifier that can be directly applied to and generalize well on the test task. We evaluate our method extensively on four benchmark dialogue datasets and observe significant improvements over state-of-the-art approaches. Our code has been released at https://github.com/liam0949/DCLOOS.

Out-of-Scope Intent Detection with Self-Supervision and Discriminative Training

Dialogue generation has been improved through injecting knowledge into generative models. However, addition of knowledge through simple selection of sentences or paragraphs is likely to introduce noise and diminish the effectiveness of the generative models. In this paper, we present a novel Knowledge Term Weighting Model (KTWM) that incorporates term-level de-noising of the selected knowledge. KTWM includes a module for generating Simulated Response Vectors (SRVs) and uses SRVs attention distributions with the knowledge embeddings to determine knowledge term weights. Our experiments demonstrate that KTWM, combined with various knowledge selection algorithms, consistently achieves statistically significant improvements over methods without term weighting when applied to two publicly available datasets Wizard of Wikipedia (Wiz) and Holl-E. The results are particularly improved for the Wiz test data with unseen topics, demonstrating the robustness of the KTWM noise-reduction approach.

Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Generation with Term-level De-noising

The field of natural language understanding has experienced exponential progress in the last few years, with impressive results in several tasks. This success has motivated researchers to study the underlying knowledge encoded by these models. Despite this, attempts to understand their semantic capabilities have not been successful, often leading to non-conclusive, or contradictory conclusions among different works. Via a probing classifier, we extract the underlying knowledge graph of nine of the most influential language models of the last years, including word embeddings, text generators, and context encoders. This probe is based on concept relatedness, grounded on WordNet. Our results reveal that all the models encode this knowledge, but suffer from several inaccuracies. Furthermore, we show that the different architectures and training strategies lead to different model biases. We conduct a systematic evaluation to discover specific factors that explain why some concepts are challenging. We hope our insights will motivate the development of models that capture concepts more precisely.

Inspecting the concept knowledge graph encoded by modern language models

Generative linguistic steganography mainly utilized language models and applied steganographic sampling (stegosampling) to generate high-security steganographic text (stegotext). However, previous methods generally lead to statistical differences between the conditional probability distributions of stegotext and natural text, which brings about security risks. In this paper, to further ensure security, we present a novel provably secure generative linguistic steganographic method ADG, which recursively embeds secret information by Adaptive Dynamic Grouping of tokens according to their probability given by an off-the-shelf language model. We not only prove the security of ADG mathematically, but also conduct extensive experiments on three public corpora to further verify its imperceptibility. The experimental results reveal that the proposed method is able to generate stegotext with nearly perfect security.

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