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1. Entity-Aware Dependency-Based Deep Graph Attention Network for Comparative Preference Classification

   https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.512  

   Ma, Nianzu ; Mazumder, Sahisnu ; Wang, Hao ; Liu, Bing ( July 2020 , Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics)

   This paper studies the task of comparative preference classification (CPC). Given two entities in a sentence, our goal is to classify whether the first (or the second) entity is preferred over the other or no comparison is expressed at all between the two entities. Existing works either do not learn entity-aware representations well and fail to deal with sentences involving multiple entity pairs or use sequential modeling approaches that are unable to capture long-range dependencies between the entities. Some also use traditional machine learning approaches that do not generalize well. This paper proposes a novel Entity-aware Dependency-based Deep Graph Attention Network (ED-GAT) that employs a multi-hop graph attention over a dependency graph sentence representation to leverage both the semantic information from word embeddings and the syntactic information from the dependency graph to solve the problem. Empirical evaluation shows that the proposed model achieves the state-of-the-art performance in comparative preference classification. 

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2. ConvKT: Conversation-Level Knowledge Transfer for Context Aware End-to-End Spoken Language Understanding

   https://doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2023-2018  

   Sunder, Vishal ; Fosler-Lussier, Eric ; Thomas, Samuel ; Kuo, Hong-Kwang J ; Kingsbury, Brian ( August 2023 , ISCA)

   Dialog history enhances downstream classification performance in both speech and text based dialog systems. However, there still exists a gap in dialog history integration in a fully end-to-end (E2E) spoken dialog system (SDS) versus a textual dia- log system. Text-based dialog systems use large language models (LLMs) to encode long-range dependencies by attending to the entire conversation as a contiguous token sequence. This is not possible in an E2E SDS, as speech sequences can be intractably long. We propose a convolution subsampling approach to make the speech sequence of a conversation tractable and use a conformer to attend to the speech-based conversation in a fine-grained manner. This model is further enhanced via a conversation-level knowledge transfer from a LLM using a token-level alignment strategy. Finetuning the E2E model pretrained this way gives significant gains, of up to 8%, over strong non-contextual baselines in the E2E dialog act classification task on two datasets. 

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3. Neural MultiVoice Models for Expressing Novel Personalities in Dialog

   https://doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2018-2174  

   Oraby, Shereen ; Reed, Lena ; T.S., Sharath ; Tandon, Shubhangi ; Walker, Marilyn ( September 2018 , Proceedings of Interspeech 2018)

   Natural language generators for task-oriented dialog should be able to vary the style of the output utterance while still effectively realizing the system dialog actions and their associated semantics. While the use of neural generation for training the response generation component of conversational agents promises to simplify the process of producing high quality responses in new domains, to our knowledge, there has been very little investigation of neural generators for task-oriented dialog that can vary their response style and we know of no experiments on models that can generate responses that are different in style from those seen during training, while still maintaining semantic fidelity to the input meaning representation. Here, we show that a model that is trained to achieve a single stylistic personality target can produce outputs that combine stylistic targets. We carefully evaluate the multivoice outputs for both semantic fidelity and for similarities to and differences from the linguistic features that characterize the original training style. We show that contrary to our predictions, the learned models do not always simply interpolate model parameters, but rather produce styles that are distinct and novel from the personalities they were trained on. 

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4. Dialog Policy Learning for Joint Clarification and Active Learning Queries

   Padmakumar, A ; Mooney, R. ( February 2021 , Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence)

   null (Ed.)

   Intelligent systems need to be able to recover from mistakes, resolve uncertainty, and adapt to novel concepts not seen during training. Dialog interaction can enable this by the use of clarifications for correction and resolving uncertainty, and active learning queries to learn new concepts encountered during operation. Prior work on dialog systems has either focused on exclusively learning how to perform clarification/ information seeking, or to perform active learning. In this work, we train a hierarchical dialog policy to jointly perform both clarification and active learning in the context of an interactive language-based image retrieval task motivated by an on-line shopping application, and demonstrate that jointly learning dialog policies for clarification and active learning is more effective than the use of static dialog policies for one or both of these functions. 

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5. Attributed Graph Clustering: an Attribute-aware Graph Embedding Approach

   Akbas, Esra ; Zhao, Peixiang ( January 2017 , 2017 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining)

   Graph clustering is a fundamental problem in social network analysis, the goal of which is to group vertices of a graph into a series of densely knitted clusters with each cluster well separated from all the others. Classical graph clustering methods take advantage of the graph topology to model and quantify vertex proximity. With the proliferation of rich graph contents, such as user profiles in social networks, and gene annotations in protein interaction networks, it is essential to consider both the structure and content information of graphs for high-quality graph clustering. In this paper, we propose a graph embedding approach to clustering content-enriched graphs. The key idea is to embed each vertex of a graph into a continuous vector space where the localized structural and attributive information of vertices can be encoded in a unified, latent representation. Specifically, we quantify vertex-wise attribute proximity into edge weights, and employ truncated, attribute-aware random walks to learn the latent representations for vertices. We evaluate our attribute-aware graph embedding method in real-world attributed graphs, and the results demonstrate its effectiveness in comparison with state-of-the-art algorithms. 

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