United Arab Emirates

Reflection is an essential counselling strategy, where the therapist listens actively and responds with their own interpretation of the client&#39;s words. Recent work leveraged pre-trained language models (PLMs) to approach reflection generation as a promising tool to aid counsellor training. However, those studies used limited dialogue context for modelling and simplistic error analysis for human evaluation. In this work, we take the first step towards addressing those limitations. First, we fine-tune PLMs on longer dialogue contexts for reflection generation. Then, we collect free-text error descriptions from non-experts about generated reflections, identify common patterns among them, and accordingly establish discrete error categories using thematic analysis. Based on this scheme, we plan for future work a mass non-expert error annotation phase for generated reflections followed by an expert-based validation phase, namely &quot;whether a coherent and consistent response is a good reflection&quot;.

EMNLP 2022

Towards In-Context Non-Expert Evaluation of Reflection Generation for Counselling Conversations

counselling

reflection generation

evaluation

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

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ACL 2025

Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Reflection is an essential counselling strategy, where the therapist listens actively and responds with their own interpretation of the client's words. Recent work leveraged pre-trained language models (PLMs) to approach reflection generation as a promising tool to aid counsellor training. However, those studies used limited dialogue context for modelling and simplistic error analysis for human evaluation. In this work, we take the first step towards addressing those limitations. First, we fine-tune PLMs on longer dialogue contexts for reflection generation. Then, we collect free-text error descriptions from non-experts about generated reflections, identify common patterns among them, and accordingly establish discrete error categories using thematic analysis. Based on this scheme, we plan for future work a mass non-expert error annotation phase for generated reflections followed by an expert-based validation phase, namely "whether a coherent and consistent response is a good reflection".

workshop paper

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EMNLP 2022 will take place in Abu Dhabi from December 7th to December 11th, 2022. And it will be held in hybrid mode, both online and offline.

Language models have demonstrated the ability to generate highly fluent text; however, it remains unclear whether their output retains coherent high-level structure (e.g., story progression). Here, we propose to apply a statistical tool, model criticism in latent space, to evaluate the high-level structure of the generated text. Model criticism compares the distributions between real and generated data in a latent space obtained according to an assumptive generative process. Different generative processes identify specific failure modes of the underlying model. We perform experiments on three representative aspects of high-level discourse---coherence, coreference, and topicality---and find that transformer-based language models are able to capture topical structures but have a harder time maintaining structural coherence or modeling coreference structures.

Model Criticism for Long-Form Text Generation

Human Evaluation (HE) of automatically generated responses is necessary for the advancement of human-machine dialogue research. Current automatic evaluation measures are poor surrogates, at best. There are no agreed-upon HE protocols and it is difficult to develop them. As a result, researchers either perform non-replicable, non-transparent and inconsistent procedures or, worse, limit themselves to automated metrics. We propose to standardize the human evaluation of response generation models by publicly sharing a detailed protocol. The proposal includes the task design, annotators recruitment, task execution, and annotation reporting. Such protocol and process can be used as-is, as-a-whole, in-part, or modified and extended by the research community. We validate the protocol by evaluating two conversationally fine-tuned state-of-the-art models (GPT-2 and T5) for the complex task of personalized response generation. We invite the community to use this protocol - or its future community amended versions - as a transparent, replicable, and comparable approach to HE of generated responses.

Evaluation of Response Generation Models: Shouldn't It Be Shareable and Replicable?

Logic-to-text generation is an important yet underrepresented area of natural language generation (NLG). In particular, most previous works on this topic lack sound evaluation. We address this limitation by building and evaluating a system that generates high-quality English text given a first-order logic (FOL) formula as input. We start by analyzing the performance of Ranta (2011)'s system. Based on this analysis, we develop an extended version of the system, which we name LoLa, that performs formula simplification based on logical equivalences and syntactic transformations. We carry out an extensive evaluation of LoLa using standard automatic metrics and human evaluation. We compare the results against a baseline and Ranta (2011)'s system. The results show that LoLa outperforms the other two systems in most aspects.

Enhancing and Evaluating the Grammatical Framework Approach to Logic-to-Text Generation

To be trusted and perceived as natural and coherent, conversational systems must adapt to the language of their users. While personalized dialogue is a promising direction, controlling generation for fine-grained language features remains a challenge in this approach. A recent line of research showed the effectiveness of leveraging pre-trained language models toward adapting to a text's topic or sentiment. In this study, we build on these approaches and focus on a higher-level dimension of language variation: speakers' age. We frame the task as a dialogue response generation, and test methods based on bag-of-words (BoW) and neural discriminators (Disc) to condition the output of GPT-2 and DialoGPT without altering the parameters of the language models. We show that Disc models achieve a higher degree of detectable control than BoW models based on automatic evaluation. In contrast, humans can partially detect age differences in BoW but not Disc responses. Since BoW responses are deemed better than Disc ones by humans, simple controllable methods thus appear to be a better tradeoff between adaptation and language quality. Our work confirms the challenges of adapting to higher-level dimensions of language variation. Moreover, it highlights the need to evaluate natural language generation thoroughly.

Controllable Text Generation for All Ages: Evaluating a Plug-and-Play Approach to Age-Adapted Dialogue

Text generation has long been a popular research topic in NLP. However, the task of generating contact emails from recruiters to candidates in the job recommendation scenario has received little attention by the research community. This work aims at defining the topic of automatic email generation for job recommendation, identifying the challenges, and providing a baseline template-based solution for Danish jobs. Evaluation by human experts shows that our method is effective. We wrap up by discussing the future research directions for better solving this task.

Template-based Contact Email Generation for Job Recommendation

Evaluating natural language generation is difficult. We propose a general framework that helps solve this difficulty by unifying the evaluation with a common central operation. Our uniformly designed metrics outperform state-of-the-art metrics specially designed for diverse tasks such as summarization, style transfer, and knowledge-grounded dialog.

Compression, Transduction, and Creation: A Unified Framework for Evaluating Natural Language Generation

Automatic Text Summarization has seen a large paradigm shift from extractive methods to abstractive (or generation-based) methods in the last few years. This can be attributed to the availability of large autoregressive language models that have been shown to outperform extractive methods. In this work, we revisit extractive methods and study their performance against state of the art(SOTA) abstractive models. Through extensive studies, we notice that abstractive methods are not yet completely abstractive in their generated summaries. In addition to this finding, we propose an evaluation metric that could benefit the summarization research community to measure the degree of abstractiveness of a summary in comparison to their extractive counterparts. To confirm the generalizability of our findings, we conduct experiments on two summarization datasets using five powerful techniques in extractive and abstractive summarization and study their levels of abstraction.

Are Abstractive Summarization Models truly `Abstractive'? An Empirical Study to Compare the two Forms of Summarization

Writing job vacancies is a repetitive and expensive task for humans. This research focuses on automatically generating the benefit sections of vacancies at redacted from job attributes using mT5, the multilingual version of the state-of-the-art T5 transformer trained on general domains to generate texts in multiple languages. While transformers are accurate at generating coherent text, they are sometimes incorrect at including the structured data (the input) in the generated text. Including the input correctly is crucial for vacancy text generation; otherwise, the candidates may get misled. To evaluate how the model includes the input we developed our own domain-specific metrics (input generation accuracy). This was necessary, because Relation Generation, the pre-existing evaluation metric for data-to-text generation uses only string matching, which was not suitable for our dataset (due to the binary field). With the help of the new evaluation method we were able to measure how well the input is included in the generated text separately for different types of inputs (binary, categorical, numeric), offering another contribution to the field. Additionally, we also evaluated how accurate the mT5 model generates the text in the requested language. The results show that mT5 is very accurate at generating the text in the correct language, at including seen categorical inputs and binary values correctly in the generated text. However, mT5 performed worse when generating text from unseen city names or working with numeric inputs. Furthermore, we found that generating additional synthetic training data for the samples with numeric input can increase the input generation accuracy, however this only works when the numbers are integers and only cover a small range.

Transfer learning for multilingual vacancy text generation

Recent pre-trained language models have shown promising capability to generate fluent and realistic natural text. However, generating multi-sentence text with global content planning has been a long-existing research question. The current controlled text generation models cannot directly address this issue, as they usually condition on single known control attribute. We propose a low-cost yet effective framework that explicitly models content plans and optimizes the joint distribution of the natural sequence and the content plans in a plug-and-play post-processing manner. We evaluate our model with extensive automatic metrics and human evaluations and show that it achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the recipe generation task on Recipe1M+ dataset.

Plug-and-Play Recipe Generation with Content Planning

Controllable Text Generation (CTG) has obtained great success due to its fine-grained generation ability obtained by focusing on multiple attributes. However, most existing CTG researches overlook how to utilize the attribute entanglement to enhance the diversity of the controlled generated texts. Facing this dilemma, we focus on a novel CTG scenario, i.e., blessing generation which is challenging because high-quality blessing texts require CTG models to comprehensively consider the entanglement between multiple attributes (e.g., objects and occasions). To promote the research on blessing generation, we present EBleT, a large-scale Entangled Blessing Text dataset containing 293K English sentences annotated with multiple attributes. Furthermore, we propose novel evaluation metrics to measure the quality of the blessing texts generated by the baseline models we designed. Our study opens a new research direction for controllable text generation and enables the development of attribute-entangled CTG models.

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Model Criticism for Long-Form Text Generation

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