13 Papers From the NLP and Speech Group Accepted to the ACL-IJCNLP 2021

Research from the department has been accepted to the Joint Conference of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (ACL-IJCNLP 2021). 

Below are the abstracts and links to the accepted papers.

COVID-Fact: Fact Extraction and Verification of Real-World Claims on COVID-19 Pandemic
Arkadiy Saakyan, Tuhin Chakrabarty, and Smaranda Muresan

We introduce a FEVER-like dataset COVID-Fact of 4,086 claims concerning the COVID-19 pandemic. The dataset contains claims, evidence for the claims, and contradictory claims refuted by the evidence. Unlike previous approaches, we automatically detect true claims and their source articles and then generate counter-claims using automatic methods rather than employing human annotators. Along with our constructed resource, we formally present the task of identifying relevant evidence for the claims and verifying whether the evidence refutes or supports a given claim. In addition to scientific claims, our data contains simplified general claims from media sources, making it better suited for detecting general misinformation regarding COVID-19. Our experiments indicate that COVID-Fact will provide a challenging testbed for the development of new systems and our approach will reduce the costs of building domain-specific datasets for detecting misinformation.

Metaphor Generation with Conceptual Mappings
Kevin Stowe, Tuhin Chakrabarty, Nanyun Peng, Smaranda Muresan, and Iryna Gurevych

Generating metaphors is a difficult task as it requires understanding nuanced relationships between abstract concepts. In this paper, we aim to generate a metaphoric sentence given a literal expression by replacing relevant verbs. Guided by conceptual metaphor theory, we propose to control the generation process by encoding conceptual mappings between cognitive domains to generate meaningful metaphoric expressions. To achieve this, we develop two methods: 1) using FrameNet-based embeddings to learn mappings between domains and applying them at the lexical level (CM-Lex), and 2) deriving source/target pairs to train a controlled seq-to-seq generation model (CM-BART). We assess our methods through automatic and human evaluation for basic metaphoricity and conceptual metaphor presence. We show that the unsupervised CM-Lex model is competitive with recent deep learning metaphor generation systems, and CM-BART outperforms all other models both in automatic and human evaluations.

Weakly-Supervised Methods for Suicide Risk Assessment: Role of Related Domains
Chenghao Yang, Yudong Zhang, and Smaranda Muresan

Social media has become a valuable resource for the study of suicidal ideation and the assessment of suicide risk. Among social media platforms, Reddit has emerged as the most promising one due to its anonymity and its focus on topic-based communities (subreddits) that can be indicative of someone’s state of mind or interest regarding mental health disorders such as r/SuicideWatch, r/Anxiety, r/depression. A challenge for previous work on suicide risk assessment has been the small amount of labeled data. We propose an empirical investigation into several classes of weakly-supervised approaches, and show that using pseudo-labeling based on related issues around mental health (e.g., anxiety, depression) helps improve model performance for suicide risk assessment.

Improving Factual Consistency of Abstractive Summarization via Question Answering
Feng Nan, Cicero Nogueira Dos Santos, Henghui Zhu, Patrick Ng, Kathleen McKeown, Ramesh Nallapati, Dejiao Zhang, Zhiguo Wang, Andrew O. Arnold, and Bing Xiang

A commonly observed problem with the state-of-the art abstractive summarization models is that the generated summaries can be factually inconsistent with the input documents. The fact that automatic summarization may produce plausible-sounding yet inaccurate summaries is a major concern that limits its wide application. In this paper we present an approach to address factual consistency in summarization. We first propose an efficient automatic evaluation metric to measure factual consistency; next, we propose a novel learning algorithm that maximizes the proposed metric during model training. Through extensive experiments, we confirm that our method is effective in improving factual consistency and even overall quality of the summaries, as judged by both automatic metrics and human evaluation.

InfoSurgeon: Cross-Media Fine-grained Information Consistency Checking for Fake News Detection
Yi Fung, Christopher Thomas, Revanth Gangi Reddy, Sandeep Polisetty, Heng Ji, Shih-Fu Chang, Kathleen McKeown, Mohit Bansal, and Avi Sil

To defend against neural system-generated fake news, an effective mechanism is urgently needed. We contribute a novel benchmark for fake news detection at the knowledge element level, as well as a solution for this task which incorporates cross-media consistency checking to detect the fine-grained knowledge elements making news articles misinformative. Due to training data scarcity, we also formulate a novel data synthesis method by manipulating knowledge elements within the knowledge graph to generate noisy training data with specific, hard to detect, known inconsistencies. Our detection approach outperforms the state-of-the-art (up to 16.8% absolute accuracy gain), and more critically, yields fine-grained explanations.

Cross-language Sentence Selection via Data Augmentation and Rationale Training
Yanda Chen, Chris Kedzie, Suraj Nair, Petra Galuscakova, Rui Zhang, Douglas Oard, and Kathleen McKeown

This paper proposes an approach to crosslanguage sentence selection in a low-resource setting. It uses data augmentation and negative sampling techniques on noisy parallel sentence data to directly learn a cross-lingual embedding-based query relevance model. Results show that this approach performs as well as or better than multiple state-of-theart machine translation + monolingual retrieval systems trained on the same parallel data. Moreover, when a rationale training secondary objective is applied to encourage the model to match word alignment hints from a phrase-based statistical machine translation model, consistent improvements are seen across three language pairs (EnglishSomali, English-Swahili and English-Tagalog) over a variety of state-of-the-art baselines.

SocAoG: Incremental Graph Parsing for Social Relation Inference in Dialogues
Liang Qiu, Yuan Liang, Yizhou Zhao, Pan Lu, Baolin Peng, Zhou Yu, Ying Nian Wu, and Song-Chun Zhu

Inferring social relations from dialogues is vital for building emotionally intelligent robots to interpret human language better and act accordingly. We model the social network as an And-or Graph, named SocAoG, for the consistency of relations among a group and leveraging attributes as inference cues. Moreover, we formulate a sequential structure prediction task, and propose an α–β–γ strategy to incrementally parse SocAoG for the dynamic inference upon any incoming utterance: (i) an α process predicting attributes and relations conditioned on the semantics of dialogues, (ii) a β process updating the social relations based on related attributes, and (iii) a γ process updating individual’s attributes based on interpersonal social relations. Empirical results on DialogRE and MovieGraph show that our model infers social relations more accurately than the state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, the ablation study shows the three processes complement each other, and the case study demonstrates the dynamic relational inference.

HERALD: An Annotation Efficient Method to Detect User Disengagement in Social Conversations
Weixin Liang, Kai-Hui Liang, and Zhou Yu

Open-domain dialog systems have a usercentric goal: to provide humans with an engaging conversation experience. User engagement is one of the most important metrics for evaluating open-domain dialog systems, and could also be used as real-time feedback to benefit dialog policy learning. Existing work on detecting user disengagement typically requires hand-labeling many dialog samples. We propose HERALD, an efficient annotation framework that reframes the training data annotation process as a denoising problem. Specifically, instead of manually labeling training samples, we first use a set of labeling heuristics to label training samples automatically. We then denoise the weakly labeled data using the Shapley algorithm. Finally, we use the denoised data to train a user engagement detector. Our experiments show that HERALD improves annotation efficiency significantly and achieves 86% user disengagement detection accuracy in two dialog corpora. Our implementation is available at https:// github.com/Weixin-Liang/HERALD/.

Towards Emotional Support Dialog Systems
Siyang Liu, Chujie Zheng, Orianna Demasi, Sahand Sabour, Yu Li, Zhou Yu, Yong Jiang, and Minlie Huang

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 untouched. In this paper, we define the Emotional Support Conversation (ESC) task and propose an ESC Framework, which is grounded on the Helping Skills Theory (Hill, 2009). 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.

Discovering Dialogue Slots with Weak Supervision
Vojtch Hudeek, Ondej Dusek, and Zhou Yu

Task-oriented dialogue systems typically require manual annotation of dialogue slots in training data, which is costly to obtain. We propose a method that eliminates this requirement: We use weak supervision from existing linguistic annotation models to identify potential slot candidates, then automatically identify domain-relevant slots by using clustering algorithms. Furthermore, we use the resulting slot annotation to train a neural-network-based tagger that is able to perform slot tagging with no human intervention. This tagger is trained solely on the outputs of our method and thus does not rely on any labeled data. Our model demonstrates state-of-the-art performance in slot tagging without labeled training data on four different dialogue domains. Moreover, we find that slot annotations discovered by our model significantly improve the performance of an end-to-end dialogue response generation model, compared to using no slot annotation at all.

The R-U-A-Robot Dataset: Helping Avoid Chatbot Deception by Detecting User Questions About Human or Non-Human Identity
David Gros, Yu Li, and Zhou Yu

Humans are increasingly interacting with machines through language, sometimes in contexts where the user may not know they are talking to a machine (like over the phone or a text chatbot). We aim to understand how system designers and researchers might allow their systems to confirm its non-human identity. We collect over 2,500 phrasings related to the intent of “Are you a robot?”. This is paired with over 2,500 adversarially selected utterances where only confirming the system is non-human would be insufficient or disfluent. We compare classifiers to recognize the intent and discuss the precision/recall and model complexity tradeoffs. Such classifiers could be integrated into dialog systems to avoid undesired deception. We then explore how both a generative research model (Blender) as well as two deployed systems (Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant) handle this intent, finding that systems often fail to confirm their nonhuman identity. Finally, we try to understand what a good response to the intent would be, and conduct a user study to compare the important aspects when responding to this intent.

On the Generation of Medical Dialogs for COVID-19
Meng Zhou, Zechen Li, Bowen Tan, Guangtao Zeng, Wenmian Yang, Xuehai He, Zeqian Ju, Subrato Chakravorty, Shu Chen, Xingyi Yang, Yichen Zhang, Qingyang Wu, Zhou Yu, Kun Xu, Eric Xing, and Pengtao Xie

Under the pandemic of COVID-19, people experiencing COVID19-related symptoms or exposed to risk factors have a pressing need to consult doctors. Due to hospital closure, a lot of consulting services have been moved online. Because of the shortage of medical professionals, many people cannot receive online consultations timely. To address this problem, we aim to develop a medical dialogue system that can provide COVID19-related consultations. We collected two dialogue datasets – CovidDialog – (in English and Chinese respectively) containing conversations between doctors and patients about COVID-19. On these two datasets, we train several dialogue generation models based on Transformer, GPT, and BERT-GPT. Since the two COVID-19 dialogue datasets are small in size, which bear high risk of overfitting, we leverage transfer learning to mitigate data deficiency. Specifically, we take the pretrained models of Transformer, GPT, and BERT-GPT on dialog datasets and other large-scale texts, then finetune them on our CovidDialog datasets. Experiments demonstrate that these approaches are promising in generating meaningful medical dialogues about COVID-19. But more advanced approaches are needed to build a fully useful dialogue system that can offer accurate COVID-related consultations. The data and code are available at https://github.com/UCSD-AI4H/COVID-Dialogue

PRAL: A Tailored Pre-Training Model for Task-Oriented Dialog Generation
Jing Gu, Qingyang Wu, Chongruo Wu, Weiyan Shi, and Zhou Yu

The recent success of large pre-trained language models such as BERT and GPT-2 has suggested the effectiveness of incorporating language priors in down-stream dialog generation tasks. However, the performance of pre-trained models on dialog task is not as optimal as expected. In this paper, we propose a Pre-trained Role Alternating Language model (PRAL), designed specifically for taskoriented conversational systems. We adopt ARDM (Wu et al., 2019) that models two speakers separately. We also design several techniques, such as start position randomization, knowledge distillation and history discount to improve pre-training performance. We introduce a task-oriented dialog pretraining dataset by cleaning 13 existing data sets. We test PRAL on three different downstream tasks. The results show that PRAL performs better or on par with the state-of-the-art methods.