No Arabic abstract
In this work, we study how the finetuning stage in the pretrain-finetune framework changes the behavior of a pretrained neural language generator. We focus on the transformer encoder-decoder model for the open-domain dialogue response generation task. Our major finding is that after standard finetuning, the model forgets some of the important language generation skills acquired during large-scale pretraining. We demonstrate the forgetting phenomenon through a set of detailed behavior analysis from the perspectives of knowledge transfer, context sensitivity, and function space projection. As a preliminary attempt to alleviate the forgetting problem, we propose an intuitive finetuning strategy named mix-review. We find that mix-review effectively regularizes the finetuning process, and the forgetting problem is alleviated to some extent. Finally, we discuss interesting behavior of the resulting dialogue model and its implications.
Humans use commonsense reasoning (CSR) implicitly to produce natural and coherent responses in conversations. Aiming to close the gap between current response generation (RG) models and human communication abilities, we want to understand why RG models respond as they do by probing RG models understanding of commonsense reasoning that elicits proper responses. We formalize the problem by framing commonsense as a latent variable in the RG task and using explanations for responses as textual form of commonsense. We collect 6k annotated explanations justifying responses from four dialogue datasets and ask humans to verify them and propose two probing settings to evaluate RG models CSR capabilities. Probing results show that models fail to capture the logical relations between commonsense explanations and responses and fine-tuning on in-domain data and increasing model sizes do not lead to understanding of CSR for RG. We hope our study motivates more research in making RG models emulate the human reasoning process in pursuit of smooth human-AI communication.
Neural dialogue models have been widely adopted in various chatbot applications because of their good performance in simulating and generalizing human conversations. However, there exists a dark side of these models -- due to the vulnerability of neural networks, a neural dialogue model can be manipulated by users to say what they want, which brings in concerns about the security of practical chatbot services. In this work, we investigate whether we can craft inputs that lead a well-trained black-box neural dialogue model to generate targeted outputs. We formulate this as a reinforcement learning (RL) problem and train a Reverse Dialogue Generator which efficiently finds such inputs for targeted outputs. Experiments conducted on a representative neural dialogue model show that our proposed model is able to discover such desired inputs in a considerable portion of cases. Overall, our work reveals this weakness of neural dialogue models and may prompt further researches of developing corresponding solutions to avoid it.
In this paper, we investigate data augmentation for text generation, which we call GenAug. Text generation and language modeling are important tasks within natural language processing, and are especially challenging for low-data regimes. We propose and evaluate various augmentation methods, including some that incorporate external knowledge, for finetuning GPT-2 on a subset of Yelp Reviews. We also examine the relationship between the amount of augmentation and the quality of the generated text. We utilize several metrics that evaluate important aspects of the generated text including its diversity and fluency. Our experiments demonstrate that insertion of character-level synthetic noise and keyword replacement with hypernyms are effective augmentation methods, and that the quality of generations improves to a peak at approximately three times the amount of original data.
Generating fluent and informative responses is of critical importance for task-oriented dialogue systems. Existing pipeline approaches generally predict multiple dialogue acts first and use them to assist response generation. There are at least two shortcomings with such approaches. First, the inherent structures of multi-domain dialogue acts are neglected. Second, the semantic associations between acts and responses are not taken into account for response generation. To address these issues, we propose a neural co-generation model that generates dialogue acts and responses concurrently. Unlike those pipeline approaches, our act generation module preserves the semantic structures of multi-domain dialogue acts and our response generation module dynamically attends to different acts as needed. We train the two modules jointly using an uncertainty loss to adjust their task weights adaptively. Extensive experiments are conducted on the large-scale MultiWOZ dataset and the results show that our model achieves very favorable improvement over several state-of-the-art models in both automatic and human evaluations.
This work shows how to improve and interpret the commonly used dual encoder model for response suggestion in dialogue. We present an attentive dual encoder model that includes an attention mechanism on top of the extracted word-level features from two encoders, one for context and one for label respectively. To improve the interpretability in the dual encoder models, we design a novel regularization loss to minimize the mutual information between unimportant words and desired labels, in addition to the original attention method, so that important words are emphasized while unimportant words are de-emphasized. This can help not only with model interpretability, but can also further improve model accuracy. We propose an approximation method that uses a neural network to calculate the mutual information. Furthermore, by adding a residual layer between raw word embeddings and the final encoded context feature, word-level interpretability is preserved at the final prediction of the model. We compare the proposed model with existing methods for the dialogue response task on two public datasets (Persona and Ubuntu). The experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model in terms of better Recall@1 accuracy and visualized interpretability.