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Recent studies in dialogue state tracking (DST) leverage historical information to determine states which are generally represented as slot-value pairs. However, most of them have limitations to efficiently exploit relevant context due to the lack of a powerful mechanism for modeling interactions between the slot and the dialogue history. Besides, existing methods usually ignore the slot imbalance problem and treat all slots indiscriminately, which limits the learning of hard slots and eventually hurts overall performance. In this paper, we propose to enhance the DST through employing a contextual hierarchical attention network to not only discern relevant information at both word level and turn level but also learn contextual representations. We further propose an adaptive objective to alleviate the slot imbalance problem by dynamically adjust weights of different slots during training. Experimental results show that our approach reaches 52.68% and 58.55% joint accuracy on MultiWOZ 2.0 and MultiWOZ 2.1 datasets respectively and achieves new state-of-the-art performance with considerable improvements (+1.24% and +5.98%)., Comment: This paper has been withdrawn from ACL 2020. More modifications are needed

Recently, variational auto-encoder (VAE) based approaches have made impressive progress on improving the diversity of generated responses. However, these methods usually suffer the cost of decreased relevance accompanied by diversity improvements. In this paper, we propose a novel multimodal response generation framework with exemplar augmentation and curriculum optimization to enhance relevance and diversity of generated responses. First, unlike existing VAE-based models that usually approximate a simple Gaussian posterior distribution, we present a Gaussian mixture posterior distribution (i.e, multimodal) to further boost response diversity, which helps capture complex semantics of responses. Then, to ensure that relevance does not decrease while diversity increases, we fully exploit similar examples (exemplars) retrieved from the training data into posterior distribution modeling to augment response relevance. Furthermore, to facilitate the convergence of Gaussian mixture prior and posterior distributions, we devise a curriculum optimization strategy to progressively train the model under multiple training criteria from easy to hard. Experimental results on widely used SwitchBoard and DailyDialog datasets demonstrate that our model achieves significant improvements compared to strong baselines in terms of diversity and relevance.

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) mainly involves three subtasks: aspect term extraction, opinion term extraction, and aspect-level sentiment classification, which are typically handled in a separate or joint manner. However, previous approaches do not well exploit the interactive relations among three subtasks and do not pertinently leverage the easily available document-level labeled domain/sentiment knowledge, which restricts their performances. To address these issues, we propose a novel Iterative Multi-Knowledge Transfer Network (IMKTN) for end-to-end ABSA. For one thing, through the interactive correlations between the ABSA subtasks, our IMKTN transfers the task-specific knowledge from any two of the three subtasks to another one at the token level by utilizing a well-designed routing algorithm, that is, any two of the three subtasks will help the third one. For another, our IMKTN pertinently transfers the document-level knowledge, i.e., domain-specific and sentiment-related knowledge, to the aspect-level subtasks to further enhance the corresponding performance. Experimental results on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our approach., Comment: Accepted to Findings of EMNLP 2021. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with: arXiv:2004.01935

The aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) task remains to be a long-standing challenge, which aims to extract the aspect term and then identify its sentiment orientation.In previous approaches, the explicit syntactic structure of a sentence, which reflects the syntax properties of natural language and hence is intuitively crucial for aspect term extraction and sentiment recognition, is typically neglected or insufficiently modeled. In this paper, we thus propose a novel dependency syntactic knowledge augmented interactive architecture with multi-task learning for end-to-end ABSA. This model is capable of fully exploiting the syntactic knowledge (dependency relations and types) by leveraging a well-designed Dependency Relation Embedded Graph Convolutional Network (DreGcn). Additionally, we design a simple yet effective message-passing mechanism to ensure that our model learns from multiple related tasks in a multi-task learning framework. Extensive experimental results on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, which significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods. Besides, we achieve further improvements by using BERT as an additional feature extractor., Comment: Code: https://github.com/XL2248/DREGCN

Audio-Visual Scene-Aware Dialog (AVSD) is a task to generate responses when chatting about a given video, which is organized as a track of the 8th Dialog System Technology Challenge (DSTC8). To solve the task, we propose a universal multimodal transformer and introduce the multi-task learning method to learn joint representations among different modalities as well as generate informative and fluent responses. Our method extends the natural language generation pre-trained model to multimodal dialogue generation task. Our system achieves the best performance in both objective and subjective evaluations in the challenge., Comment: Accepted by AAAI2020 DSTC8 workshop. Ranked 1st in DSTC8-AVSD track

Non-Autoregressive Neural Machine Translation (NAT) achieves significant decoding speedup through generating target words independently and simultaneously. However, in the context of non-autoregressive translation, the word-level cross-entropy loss cannot model the target-side sequential dependency properly, leading to its weak correlation with the translation quality. As a result, NAT tends to generate influent translations with over-translation and under-translation errors. In this paper, we propose to train NAT to minimize the Bag-of-Ngrams (BoN) difference between the model output and the reference sentence. The bag-of-ngrams training objective is differentiable and can be efficiently calculated, which encourages NAT to capture the target-side sequential dependency and correlates well with the translation quality. We validate our approach on three translation tasks and show that our approach largely outperforms the NAT baseline by about 5.0 BLEU scores on WMT14 En$\leftrightarrow$De and about 2.5 BLEU scores on WMT16 En$\leftrightarrow$Ro., Comment: AAAI 2020

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have been widely used to deal with sequence learning problems. The input-dependent transition function, which folds new observations into hidden states to sequentially construct fixed-length representations of arbitrary-length sequences, plays a critical role in RNNs. Based on single space composition, transition functions in existing RNNs often have difficulty in capturing complicated long-range dependencies. In this paper, we introduce a new Multi-zone Unit (MZU) for RNNs. The key idea is to design a transition function that is capable of modeling multiple space composition. The MZU consists of three components: zone generation, zone composition, and zone aggregation. Experimental results on multiple datasets of the character-level language modeling task and the aspect-based sentiment analysis task demonstrate the superiority of the MZU., Comment: Accepted at AAAI 2020

Generally, Neural Machine Translation models generate target words in a left-to-right (L2R) manner and fail to exploit any future (right) semantics information, which usually produces an unbalanced translation. Recent works attempt to utilize the right-to-left (R2L) decoder in bidirectional decoding to alleviate this problem. In this paper, we propose a novel \textbf{D}ynamic \textbf{I}nteraction \textbf{M}odule (\textbf{DIM}) to dynamically exploit target semantics from R2L translation for enhancing the L2R translation quality. Different from other bidirectional decoding approaches, DIM firstly extracts helpful target information through addressing and reading operations, then updates target semantics for tracking the interactive history. Additionally, we further introduce an \textbf{agreement regularization} term into the training objective to narrow the gap between L2R and R2L translations. Experimental results on NIST Chinese$\Rightarrow$English and WMT'16 English$\Rightarrow$Romanian translation tasks show that our system achieves significant improvements over baseline systems, which also reaches comparable results compared to the state-of-the-art Transformer model with much fewer parameters of it.

Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) mainly involves two tasks, intent detection and slot filling, which are generally modeled jointly in existing works. However, most existing models fail to fully utilize co-occurrence relations between slots and intents, which restricts their potential performance. To address this issue, in this paper we propose a novel Collaborative Memory Network (CM-Net) based on the well-designed block, named CM-block. The CM-block firstly captures slot-specific and intent-specific features from memories in a collaborative manner, and then uses these enriched features to enhance local context representations, based on which the sequential information flow leads to more specific (slot and intent) global utterance representations. Through stacking multiple CM-blocks, our CM-Net is able to alternately perform information exchange among specific memories, local contexts and the global utterance, and thus incrementally enriches each other. We evaluate the CM-Net on two standard benchmarks (ATIS and SNIPS) and a self-collected corpus (CAIS). Experimental results show that the CM-Net achieves the state-of-the-art results on the ATIS and SNIPS in most of criteria, and significantly outperforms the baseline models on the CAIS. Additionally, we make the CAIS dataset publicly available for the research community., Comment: Accepted as a long paper at EMNLP 2019. Code and data is available at: https://github.com/Adaxry/CM-Net

Context modeling is essential to generate coherent and consistent translation for Document-level Neural Machine Translations. The widely used method for document-level translation usually compresses the context information into a representation via hierarchical attention networks. However, this method neither considers the relationship between context words nor distinguishes the roles of context words. To address this problem, we propose a query-guided capsule networks to cluster context information into different perspectives from which the target translation may concern. Experiment results show that our method can significantly outperform strong baselines on multiple data sets of different domains., Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Aspect based sentiment analysis (ABSA) aims to identify the sentiment polarity towards the given aspect in a sentence, while previous models typically exploit an aspect-independent (weakly associative) encoder for sentence representation generation. In this paper, we propose a novel Aspect-Guided Deep Transition model, named AGDT, which utilizes the given aspect to guide the sentence encoding from scratch with the specially-designed deep transition architecture. Furthermore, an aspect-oriented objective is designed to enforce AGDT to reconstruct the given aspect with the generated sentence representation. In doing so, our AGDT can accurately generate aspect-specific sentence representation, and thus conduct more accurate sentiment predictions. Experimental results on multiple SemEval datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach, which significantly outperforms the best reported results with the same setting., Comment: Accepted at EMNLP 2019 as a long paper. Code is available at https://github.com/XL2248/AGDT

Non-Autoregressive Transformer (NAT) aims to accelerate the Transformer model through discarding the autoregressive mechanism and generating target words independently, which fails to exploit the target sequential information. Over-translation and under-translation errors often occur for the above reason, especially in the long sentence translation scenario. In this paper, we propose two approaches to retrieve the target sequential information for NAT to enhance its translation ability while preserving the fast-decoding property. Firstly, we propose a sequence-level training method based on a novel reinforcement algorithm for NAT (Reinforce-NAT) to reduce the variance and stabilize the training procedure. Secondly, we propose an innovative Transformer decoder named FS-decoder to fuse the target sequential information into the top layer of the decoder. Experimental results on three translation tasks show that the Reinforce-NAT surpasses the baseline NAT system by a significant margin on BLEU without decelerating the decoding speed and the FS-decoder achieves comparable translation performance to the autoregressive Transformer with considerable speedup., Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures, ACL 2019 long paper

Current state-of-the-art systems for sequence labeling are typically based on the family of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs). However, the shallow connections between consecutive hidden states of RNNs and insufficient modeling of global information restrict the potential performance of those models. In this paper, we try to address these issues, and thus propose a Global Context enhanced Deep Transition architecture for sequence labeling named GCDT. We deepen the state transition path at each position in a sentence, and further assign every token with a global representation learned from the entire sentence. Experiments on two standard sequence labeling tasks show that, given only training data and the ubiquitous word embeddings (Glove), our GCDT achieves 91.96 F1 on the CoNLL03 NER task and 95.43 F1 on the CoNLL2000 Chunking task, which outperforms the best reported results under the same settings. Furthermore, by leveraging BERT as an additional resource, we establish new state-of-the-art results with 93.47 F1 on NER and 97.30 F1 on Chunking., Comment: Accepted as a long paper at ACL 2019. Code is available at: https://github.com/Adaxry/GCDT

The unsupervised text clustering is one of the major tasks in natural language processing (NLP) and remains a difficult and complex problem. Conventional \mbox{methods} generally treat this task using separated steps, including text representation learning and clustering the representations. As an improvement, neural methods have also been introduced for continuous representation learning to address the sparsity problem. However, the multi-step process still deviates from the unified optimization target. Especially the second step of cluster is generally performed with conventional methods such as k-Means. We propose a pure neural framework for text clustering in an end-to-end manner. It jointly learns the text representation and the clustering model. Our model works well when the context can be obtained, which is nearly always the case in the field of NLP. We have our method \mbox{evaluated} on two widely used benchmarks: IMDB movie reviews for sentiment classification and $20$-Newsgroup for topic categorization. Despite its simplicity, experiments show the model outperforms previous clustering methods by a large margin. Furthermore, the model is also verified on English wiki dataset as a large corpus.

Past years have witnessed rapid developments in Neural Machine Translation (NMT). Most recently, with advanced modeling and training techniques, the RNN-based NMT (RNMT) has shown its potential strength, even compared with the well-known Transformer (self-attentional) model. Although the RNMT model can possess very deep architectures through stacking layers, the transition depth between consecutive hidden states along the sequential axis is still shallow. In this paper, we further enhance the RNN-based NMT through increasing the transition depth between consecutive hidden states and build a novel Deep Transition RNN-based Architecture for Neural Machine Translation, named DTMT. This model enhances the hidden-to-hidden transition with multiple non-linear transformations, as well as maintains a linear transformation path throughout this deep transition by the well-designed linear transformation mechanism to alleviate the gradient vanishing problem. Experiments show that with the specially designed deep transition modules, our DTMT can achieve remarkable improvements on translation quality. Experimental results on Chinese->English translation task show that DTMT can outperform the Transformer model by +2.09 BLEU points and achieve the best results ever reported in the same dataset. On WMT14 English->German and English->French translation tasks, DTMT shows superior quality to the state-of-the-art NMT systems, including the Transformer and the RNMT+., Comment: Accepted at AAAI 2019. Code is available at: https://github.com/fandongmeng/DTMT_InDec