No Arabic abstract
Neural knowledge-grounded generative models for dialogue often produce content that is factually inconsistent with the knowledge they rely on, making them unreliable and limiting their applicability. Inspired by recent work on evaluating factual consistency in abstractive summarization, we propose an automatic evaluation metric for factual consistency in knowledge-grounded dialogue using automatic question generation and question answering. Our metric, denoted $Q^2$, compares answer spans using natural language inference (NLI), instead of token-based matching as done in previous work. To foster proper evaluation, we curate a novel dataset of dialogue system outputs for the Wizard-of-Wikipedia dataset, manually annotated for factual consistency. We perform a thorough meta-evaluation of $Q^2$ against other metrics using this dataset and two others, where it consistently shows higher correlation with human judgements.
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.
Neural network models usually suffer from the challenge of incorporating commonsense knowledge into the open-domain dialogue systems. In this paper, we propose a novel knowledge-aware dialogue generation model (called TransDG), which transfers question representation and knowledge matching abilities from knowledge base question answering (KBQA) task to facilitate the utterance understanding and factual knowledge selection for dialogue generation. In addition, we propose a response guiding attention and a multi-step decoding strategy to steer our model to focus on relevant features for response generation. Experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that our model has robust superiority over compared methods in generating informative and fluent dialogues. Our code is available at https://github.com/siat-nlp/TransDG.
Although deep neural networks have achieved tremendous success for question answering (QA), they are still suffering from heavy computational and energy cost for real product deployment. Further, existing QA systems are bottlenecked by the encoding time of real-time questions with neural networks, thus suffering from detectable latency in deployment for large-volume traffic. To reduce the computational cost and accelerate real-time question answering (RTQA) for practical usage, we propose to remove all the neural networks from online QA systems, and present Ocean-Q (an Ocean of Questions), which introduces a new question generation (QG) model to generate a large pool of QA pairs offline, then in real time matches an input question with the candidate QA pool to predict the answer without question encoding. Ocean-Q can be readily deployed in existing distributed database systems or search engine for large-scale query usage, and much greener with no additional cost for maintaining large neural networks. Experiments on SQuAD(-open) and HotpotQA benchmarks demonstrate that Ocean-Q is able to accelerate the fastest state-of-the-art RTQA system by 4X times, with only a 3+% accuracy drop.
Question Generation (QG) is the task of generating a plausible question for a given <passage, answer> pair. Template-based QG uses linguistically-informed heuristics to transform declarative sentences into interrogatives, whereas supervised QG uses existing Question Answering (QA) datasets to train a system to generate a question given a passage and an answer. A disadvantage of the heuristic approach is that the generated questions are heavily tied to their declarative counterparts. A disadvantage of the supervised approach is that they are heavily tied to the domain/language of the QA dataset used as training data. In order to overcome these shortcomings, we propose an unsupervised QG method which uses questions generated heuristically from summaries as a source of training data for a QG system. We make use of freely available news summary data, transforming declarative summary sentences into appropriate questions using heuristics informed by dependency parsing, named entity recognition and semantic role labeling. The resulting questions are then combined with the original news articles to train an end-to-end neural QG model. We extrinsically evaluate our approach using unsupervised QA: our QG model is used to generate synthetic QA pairs for training a QA model. Experimental results show that, trained with only 20k English Wikipedia-based synthetic QA pairs, the QA model substantially outperforms previous unsupervised models on three in-domain datasets (SQuAD1.1, Natural Questions, TriviaQA) and three out-of-domain datasets (NewsQA, BioASQ, DuoRC), demonstrating the transferability of the approach.
A fundamental ability of humans is to utilize commonsense knowledge in language understanding and question answering. In recent years, many knowledge-enhanced Commonsense Question Answering (CQA) approaches have been proposed. However, it remains unclear: (1) How far can we get by exploiting external knowledge for CQA? (2) How much potential of knowledge has been exploited in current CQA models? (3) Which are the most promising directions for future CQA? To answer these questions, we benchmark knowledge-enhanced CQA by conducting extensive experiments on multiple standard CQA datasets using a simple and effective knowledge-to-text transformation framework. Experiments show that: (1) Our knowledge-to-text framework is effective and achieves state-of-the-art performance on CommonsenseQA dataset, providing a simple and strong knowledge-enhanced baseline for CQA; (2) The potential of knowledge is still far from being fully exploited in CQA -- there is a significant performance gap from current models to our models with golden knowledge; and (3) Context-sensitive knowledge selection, heterogeneous knowledge exploitation, and commonsense-rich language models are promising CQA directions.