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1. Overview of the ninth dialog system technology challenge: Dstc9

   Gunasekara, Chulaka ( February 2021 , DSTC9 Workshop at AAAI 2021)

   his paper introduces the Ninth Dialog System Technology Challenge (DSTC-9). This edition of the DSTC focuses on applying end-to-end dialog technologies for four distinct tasks in dialog systems, namely, 1. Task-oriented dialog Modeling with unstructured knowledge access, 2. Multi-domain task-oriented dialog, 3. Interactive evaluation of dialog, and 4. Situated interactive multi-modal dialog. This paper describes the task definition, provided datasets, baselines and evaluation set-up for each track. We also summarize the results of the submitted systems to highlight the overall trends of the state-of-the-art technologies for the tasks. 

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2. Interactive Evaluation of Dialog Track at DSTC9

   Shikib Mehri, Yulan Feng ( April 2022 , LREC proceedings)

   The ultimate goal of dialog research is to develop systems that can be effectively used in interactive settings by real users. To this end, we introduced the Interactive Evaluation of Dialog Track at the 9th Dialog System Technology Challenge. This track consisted of two sub-tasks. The first sub-task involved building knowledge-grounded response generation models. The second sub-task aimed to extend dialog models beyond static datasets by assessing them in an interactive setting with real users. Our track challenges participants to develop strong response generation models and explore strategies that extend them to back-and-forth interactions with real users. The progression from static corpora to interactive evaluation introduces unique challenges and facilitates a more thorough assessment of open-domain dialog systems. This paper provides an overview of the track, including the methodology and results. Furthermore, it provides insights into how to best evaluate open-domain dialog models. 

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3. GraphMemDialog: Optimizing End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialog Systems Using Graph Memory Networks

   https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v36i10.21403  

   Wu, Jie ; Harris, Ian G ; Zhao, Hongzhi ( June 2022 , Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence)

   Effectively integrating knowledge into end-to-end task-oriented dialog systems remains a challenge. It typically requires incorporation of an external knowledge base (KB) and capture of the intrinsic semantics of the dialog history. Recent research shows promising results by using Sequence-to-Sequence models, Memory Networks, and even Graph Convolutional Networks. However, current state-of-the-art models are less effective at integrating dialog history and KB into task-oriented dialog systems in the following ways: 1. The KB representation is not fully context-aware. The dynamic interaction between the dialog history and KB is seldom explored. 2. Both the sequential and structural information in the dialog history can contribute to capturing the dialog semantics, but they are not studied concurrently. In this paper, we propose a novel Graph Memory Network (GMN) based Seq2Seq model, GraphMemDialog, to effectively learn the inherent structural information hidden in dialog history, and to model the dynamic interaction between dialog history and KBs. We adopt a modified graph attention network to learn the rich structural representation of the dialog history, whereas the context-aware representation of KB entities are learnt by our novel GMN. To fully exploit this dynamic interaction, we design a learnable memory controller coupled with external KB entity memories to recurrently incorporate dialog history context into KB entities through a multi-hop reasoning mechanism. Experiments on three public datasets show that our GraphMemDialog model achieves state-of-the-art performance and outperforms strong baselines by a large margin, especially on datatests with more complicated KB information. 

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4. A comprehensive assessment of dialog evaluation metrics

   Yi-Ting Yeh, Maxine Eskenazi ( September 2021 , ArXivorg)

   Automatic evaluation metrics are a crucial component of dialog systems research. Standard language evaluation metrics are known to be ineffective for evaluating dialog. As such, recent research has proposed a number of novel, dialog-specific metrics that correlate better with human judgements. Due to the fast pace of research, many of these metrics have been assessed on different datasets and there has as yet been no time for a systematic comparison between them. To this end, this paper provides a comprehensive assessment of recently proposed dialog evaluation metrics on a number of datasets. In this paper, 23 different automatic evaluation metrics are evaluated on 10 different datasets. Furthermore, the metrics are assessed in different settings, to better qualify their respective strengths and weaknesses. Metrics are assessed (1) on both the turn level and the dialog level, (2) for different dialog lengths, (3) for different dialog qualities (e.g., coherence, engaging), (4) for different types of response generation models (i.e., generative, retrieval, simple models and stateof-the-art models), (5) taking into account the similarity of different metrics and (6) exploring combinations of different metrics. This comprehensive assessment offers several takeaways pertaining to dialog evaluation metrics in general. It also suggests how to best assess evaluation metrics and indicates promising directions for future work. 

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5. Structured Data Representation in Natural Language Interfaces

   Yutong Shao, Arun Kumar ( September 2022 , A Quarterly bulletin of the Computer Society of the IEEE Technical Committee on Data Engineering)

   A Natural Language Interface (NLI) enables the use of human languages to interact with computer systems, including smart phones and robots. Compared to other types of interfaces, such as command line interfaces (CLIs) or graphical user interfaces (GUIs), NLIs stand to enable more people to have access to functionality behind databases or APIs as they only require knowledge of natural languages. Many NLI applications involve structured data for the domain (e.g., applications such as hotel booking, product search, and factual question answering.) Thus, to fully process user questions, in addition to natural language comprehension, understanding of structured data is also crucial for the model. In this paper, we study neural network methods for building Natural Language Interfaces (NLIs) with a focus on learning structure data representations that can generalize to novel data sources and schemata not seen at training time. Specifically, we review two tasks related to natural language interfaces: i) semantic parsing where we focus on text-to-SQL for database access, and ii) task-oriented dialog systems for API access. We survey representative methods for text-to-SQL and task-oriented dialog tasks, focusing on representing and incorporating structured data. Lastly, we present two of our original studies on structured data representation methods for NLIs to enable access to i) databases, and ii) visualization APIs. 

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