Daily Papers

Social interactions form the foundation of human societies. Artificial intelligence has made significant progress in certain areas, but enabling machines to seamlessly understand social interactions remains an open challenge. It is important to address this gap by endowing machines with social capabilities. We identify three key capabilities needed for effective social understanding: 1) understanding multimodal social cues, 2) understanding multi-party dynamics, and 3) understanding beliefs. Building upon these foundations, we classify and review existing machine learning works on social understanding from the perspectives of verbal, non-verbal, and multimodal social cues. The verbal branch focuses on understanding linguistic signals such as speaker intent, dialogue sentiment, and commonsense reasoning. The non-verbal branch addresses techniques for perceiving social meaning from visual behaviors such as body gestures, gaze patterns, and facial expressions. The multimodal branch covers approaches that integrate verbal and non-verbal multimodal cues to holistically interpret social interactions such as recognizing emotions, conversational dynamics, and social situations. By reviewing the scope and limitations of current approaches and benchmarks, we aim to clarify the development trajectory and illuminate the path towards more comprehensive intelligence for social understanding. We hope this survey will spur further research interest and insights into this area.

Sarcasm Explanation in Dialogue (SED) is a new yet challenging task, which aims to generate a natural language explanation for the given sarcastic dialogue that involves multiple modalities (\ie utterance, video, and audio). Although existing studies have achieved great success based on the generative pretrained language model BART, they overlook exploiting the sentiments residing in the utterance, video and audio, which play important roles in reflecting sarcasm that essentially involves subtle sentiment contrasts. Nevertheless, it is non-trivial to incorporate sentiments for boosting SED performance, due to three main challenges: 1) diverse effects of utterance tokens on sentiments; 2) gap between video-audio sentiment signals and the embedding space of BART; and 3) various relations among utterances, utterance sentiments, and video-audio sentiments. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel sEntiment-enhanceD Graph-based multimodal sarcasm Explanation framework, named EDGE. In particular, we first propose a lexicon-guided utterance sentiment inference module, where a heuristic utterance sentiment refinement strategy is devised. We then develop a module named Joint Cross Attention-based Sentiment Inference (JCA-SI) by extending the multimodal sentiment analysis model JCA to derive the joint sentiment label for each video-audio clip. Thereafter, we devise a context-sentiment graph to comprehensively model the semantic relations among the utterances, utterance sentiments, and video-audio sentiments, to facilitate sarcasm explanation generation. Extensive experiments on the publicly released dataset WITS verify the superiority of our model over cutting-edge methods.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated superior abilities in tasks such as chatting, reasoning, and question-answering. However, standard LLMs may ignore crucial paralinguistic information, such as sentiment, emotion, and speaking style, which are essential for achieving natural, human-like spoken conversation, especially when such information is conveyed by acoustic cues. We therefore propose Paralinguistics-enhanced Generative Pretrained Transformer (ParalinGPT), an LLM that utilizes text and speech modalities to better model the linguistic content and paralinguistic attributes of spoken dialogue. The model takes the conversational context of text, speech embeddings, and paralinguistic attributes as input prompts within a serialized multitasking multimodal framework. Specifically, our framework serializes tasks in the order of current paralinguistic attribute prediction, response paralinguistic attribute prediction, and response text generation with autoregressive conditioning. We utilize the Switchboard-1 corpus, including its sentiment labels as the paralinguistic attribute, as our spoken dialogue dataset. Experimental results indicate the proposed serialized multitasking method outperforms typical sequence classification techniques on current and response sentiment classification. Furthermore, leveraging conversational context and speech embeddings significantly improves both response text generation and sentiment prediction. Our proposed framework achieves relative improvements of 6.7%, 12.0%, and 3.5% in current sentiment accuracy, response sentiment accuracy, and response text BLEU score, respectively.

Current approaches for controlling dialogue response generation are primarily focused on high-level attributes like style, sentiment, or topic. In this work, we focus on constrained long-term dialogue generation, which involves more fine-grained control and requires a given set of control words to appear in generated responses. This setting requires a model to not only consider the generation of these control words in the immediate context, but also produce utterances that will encourage the generation of the words at some time in the (possibly distant) future. We define the problem of constrained long-term control for dialogue generation, identify gaps in current methods for evaluation, and propose new metrics that better measure long-term control. We also propose a retrieval-augmented method that improves performance of long-term controlled generation via logit modification techniques. We show through experiments on three task-oriented dialogue datasets that our metrics better assess dialogue control relative to current alternatives and that our method outperforms state-of-the-art constrained generation baselines.

We study improving social conversational agents by learning from natural dialogue between users and a deployed model, without extra annotations. To implicitly measure the quality of a machine-generated utterance, we leverage signals like user response length, sentiment and reaction of the future human utterances in the collected dialogue episodes. Our experiments use the publicly released deployment data from BlenderBot (Xu et al., 2023). Human evaluation indicates improvements in our new models over baseline responses; however, we find that some proxy signals can lead to more generations with undesirable properties as well. For example, optimizing for conversation length can lead to more controversial or unfriendly generations compared to the baseline, whereas optimizing for positive sentiment or reaction can decrease these behaviors.

Building a natural language dataset requires caution since word semantics is vulnerable to subtle text change or the definition of the annotated concept. Such a tendency can be seen in generative tasks like question-answering and dialogue generation and also in tasks that create a categorization-based corpus, like topic classification or sentiment analysis. Open-domain conversations involve two or more crowdworkers freely conversing about any topic, and collecting such data is particularly difficult for two reasons: 1) the dataset should be ``crafted" rather than ``obtained" due to privacy concerns, and 2) paid creation of such dialogues may differ from how crowdworkers behave in real-world settings. In this study, we tackle these issues when creating a large-scale open-domain persona dialogue corpus, where persona implies that the conversation is performed by several actors with a fixed persona and user-side workers from an unspecified crowd.

Many socio-linguistic cues are used in conversational analysis, such as emotion, sentiment, and dialogue acts. One of the fundamental cues is politeness, which linguistically possesses properties such as social manners useful in conversational analysis. This article presents findings of polite emotional dialogue act associations, where we can correlate the relationships between the socio-linguistic cues. We confirm our hypothesis that the utterances with the emotion classes Anger and Disgust are more likely to be impolite. At the same time, Happiness and Sadness are more likely to be polite. A less expectable phenomenon occurs with dialogue acts Inform and Commissive which contain more polite utterances than Question and Directive. Finally, we conclude on the future work of these findings to extend the learning of social behaviours using politeness.

Natural Language Generation (NLG) has made great progress in recent years due to the development of deep learning techniques such as pre-trained language models. This advancement has resulted in more fluent, coherent and even properties controllable (e.g. stylistic, sentiment, length etc.) generation, naturally leading to development in downstream tasks such as abstractive summarization, dialogue generation, machine translation, and data-to-text generation. However, the faithfulness problem that the generated text usually contains unfaithful or non-factual information has become the biggest challenge, which makes the performance of text generation unsatisfactory for practical applications in many real-world scenarios. Many studies on analysis, evaluation, and optimization methods for faithfulness problems have been proposed for various tasks, but have not been organized, compared and discussed in a combined manner. In this survey, we provide a systematic overview of the research progress on the faithfulness problem of NLG, including problem analysis, evaluation metrics and optimization methods. We organize the evaluation and optimization methods for different tasks into a unified taxonomy to facilitate comparison and learning across tasks. Several research trends are discussed further.

Preference Optimization (PO) has proven an effective step for aligning language models to human-desired behaviors. Current variants, following the offline Direct Preference Optimization objective, have focused on a strict setting where all tokens are contributing signals of KL divergence and rewards to the loss function. However, human preference is not affected by each word in a sequence equally but is often dependent on specific words or phrases, e.g. existence of toxic terms leads to non-preferred responses. Based on this observation, we argue that not all tokens should be weighted equally during PO and propose a flexible objective termed SparsePO, that aims to automatically learn to weight the KL divergence and reward corresponding to each token during PO training. We propose two different variants of weight-masks that can either be derived from the reference model itself or learned on the fly. Notably, our method induces sparsity in the learned masks, allowing the model to learn how to best weight reward and KL divergence contributions at the token level, learning an optimal level of mask sparsity. Extensive experiments on multiple domains, including sentiment control, dialogue, text summarization and text-to-code generation, illustrate that our approach assigns meaningful weights to tokens according to the target task, generates more responses with the desired preference and improves reasoning tasks by up to 2 percentage points compared to other token- and response-level PO methods.

While large-scale unsupervised language models (LMs) learn broad world knowledge and some reasoning skills, achieving precise control of their behavior is difficult due to the completely unsupervised nature of their training. Existing methods for gaining such steerability collect human labels of the relative quality of model generations and fine-tune the unsupervised LM to align with these preferences, often with reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). However, RLHF is a complex and often unstable procedure, first fitting a reward model that reflects the human preferences, and then fine-tuning the large unsupervised LM using reinforcement learning to maximize this estimated reward without drifting too far from the original model. In this paper, we leverage a mapping between reward functions and optimal policies to show that this constrained reward maximization problem can be optimized exactly with a single stage of policy training, essentially solving a classification problem on the human preference data. The resulting algorithm, which we call Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), is stable, performant and computationally lightweight, eliminating the need for fitting a reward model, sampling from the LM during fine-tuning, or performing significant hyperparameter tuning. Our experiments show that DPO can fine-tune LMs to align with human preferences as well as or better than existing methods. Notably, fine-tuning with DPO exceeds RLHF's ability to control sentiment of generations and improves response quality in summarization and single-turn dialogue while being substantially simpler to implement and train.

Fine-tuning pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) is essential to align them with human values and intentions. This process often utilizes methods like pairwise comparisons and KL divergence against a reference LLM, focusing on the evaluation of full answers generated by the models. However, the generation of these responses occurs in a token level, following a sequential, auto-regressive fashion. In this paper, we introduce Token-level Direct Preference Optimization (TDPO), a novel approach to align LLMs with human preferences by optimizing policy at the token level. Unlike previous methods, which face challenges in divergence efficiency, TDPO incorporates forward KL divergence constraints for each token, improving alignment and diversity. Utilizing the Bradley-Terry model for a token-based reward system, TDPO enhances the regulation of KL divergence, while preserving simplicity without the need for explicit reward modeling. Experimental results across various text tasks demonstrate TDPO's superior performance in balancing alignment with generation diversity. Notably, fine-tuning with TDPO strikes a better balance than DPO in the controlled sentiment generation and single-turn dialogue datasets, and significantly improves the quality of generated responses compared to both DPO and PPO-based RLHF methods. Our code is open-sourced at https://github.com/Vance0124/Token-level-Direct-Preference-Optimization.

Multimodal language analysis is a rapidly evolving field that leverages multiple modalities to enhance the understanding of high-level semantics underlying human conversational utterances. Despite its significance, little research has investigated the capability of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to comprehend cognitive-level semantics. In this paper, we introduce MMLA, a comprehensive benchmark specifically designed to address this gap. MMLA comprises over 61K multimodal utterances drawn from both staged and real-world scenarios, covering six core dimensions of multimodal semantics: intent, emotion, dialogue act, sentiment, speaking style, and communication behavior. We evaluate eight mainstream branches of LLMs and MLLMs using three methods: zero-shot inference, supervised fine-tuning, and instruction tuning. Extensive experiments reveal that even fine-tuned models achieve only about 60%~70% accuracy, underscoring the limitations of current MLLMs in understanding complex human language. We believe that MMLA will serve as a solid foundation for exploring the potential of large language models in multimodal language analysis and provide valuable resources to advance this field. The datasets and code are open-sourced at https://github.com/thuiar/MMLA.

Deep learning has improved performance on many natural language processing (NLP) tasks individually. However, general NLP models cannot emerge within a paradigm that focuses on the particularities of a single metric, dataset, and task. We introduce the Natural Language Decathlon (decaNLP), a challenge that spans ten tasks: question answering, machine translation, summarization, natural language inference, sentiment analysis, semantic role labeling, zero-shot relation extraction, goal-oriented dialogue, semantic parsing, and commonsense pronoun resolution. We cast all tasks as question answering over a context. Furthermore, we present a new Multitask Question Answering Network (MQAN) jointly learns all tasks in decaNLP without any task-specific modules or parameters in the multitask setting. MQAN shows improvements in transfer learning for machine translation and named entity recognition, domain adaptation for sentiment analysis and natural language inference, and zero-shot capabilities for text classification. We demonstrate that the MQAN's multi-pointer-generator decoder is key to this success and performance further improves with an anti-curriculum training strategy. Though designed for decaNLP, MQAN also achieves state of the art results on the WikiSQL semantic parsing task in the single-task setting. We also release code for procuring and processing data, training and evaluating models, and reproducing all experiments for decaNLP.

There has been growing interest in using neural networks and deep learning techniques to create dialogue systems. Conversational recommendation is an interesting setting for the scientific exploration of dialogue with natural language as the associated discourse involves goal-driven dialogue that often transforms naturally into more free-form chat. This paper provides two contributions. First, until now there has been no publicly available large-scale dataset consisting of real-world dialogues centered around recommendations. To address this issue and to facilitate our exploration here, we have collected ReDial, a dataset consisting of over 10,000 conversations centered around the theme of providing movie recommendations. We make this data available to the community for further research. Second, we use this dataset to explore multiple facets of conversational recommendations. In particular we explore new neural architectures, mechanisms, and methods suitable for composing conversational recommendation systems. Our dataset allows us to systematically probe model sub-components addressing different parts of the overall problem domain ranging from: sentiment analysis and cold-start recommendation generation to detailed aspects of how natural language is used in this setting in the real world. We combine such sub-components into a full-blown dialogue system and examine its behavior.

Dialogue systems are a popular natural language processing (NLP) task as it is promising in real-life applications. It is also a complicated task since many NLP tasks deserving study are involved. As a result, a multitude of novel works on this task are carried out, and most of them are deep learning based due to the outstanding performance. In this survey, we mainly focus on the deep learning based dialogue systems. We comprehensively review state-of-the-art research outcomes in dialogue systems and analyze them from two angles: model type and system type. Specifically, from the angle of model type, we discuss the principles, characteristics, and applications of different models that are widely used in dialogue systems. This will help researchers acquaint these models and see how they are applied in state-of-the-art frameworks, which is rather helpful when designing a new dialogue system. From the angle of system type, we discuss task-oriented and open-domain dialogue systems as two streams of research, providing insight into the hot topics related. Furthermore, we comprehensively review the evaluation methods and datasets for dialogue systems to pave the way for future research. Finally, some possible research trends are identified based on the recent research outcomes. To the best of our knowledge, this survey is the most comprehensive and up-to-date one at present for deep learning based dialogue systems, extensively covering the popular techniques. We speculate that this work is a good starting point for academics who are new to the dialogue systems or those who want to quickly grasp up-to-date techniques in this area.

While dialogue remains an important end-goal of natural language research, the difficulty of evaluation is an oft-quoted reason why it remains troublesome to make real progress towards its solution. Evaluation difficulties are actually two-fold: not only do automatic metrics not correlate well with human judgments, but also human judgments themselves are in fact difficult to measure. The two most used human judgment tests, single-turn pairwise evaluation and multi-turn Likert scores, both have serious flaws as we discuss in this work. We instead provide a novel procedure involving comparing two full dialogues, where a human judge is asked to pay attention to only one speaker within each, and make a pairwise judgment. The questions themselves are optimized to maximize the robustness of judgments across different annotators, resulting in better tests. We also show how these tests work in self-play model chat setups, resulting in faster, cheaper tests. We hope these tests become the de facto standard, and will release open-source code to that end.

The long-standing goal of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been to create human-like conversational systems. Such systems should have the ability to develop an emotional connection with the users, hence emotion recognition in dialogues is an important task. Emotion detection in dialogues is a challenging task because humans usually convey multiple emotions with varying degrees of intensities in a single utterance. Moreover, emotion in an utterance of a dialogue may be dependent on previous utterances making the task more complex. Emotion recognition has always been in great demand. However, most of the existing datasets for multi-label emotion and intensity detection in conversations are in English. To this end, we create a large conversational dataset in Hindi named EmoInHindi for multi-label emotion and intensity recognition in conversations containing 1,814 dialogues with a total of 44,247 utterances. We prepare our dataset in a Wizard-of-Oz manner for mental health and legal counselling of crime victims. Each utterance of the dialogue is annotated with one or more emotion categories from the 16 emotion classes including neutral, and their corresponding intensity values. We further propose strong contextual baselines that can detect emotion(s) and the corresponding intensity of an utterance given the conversational context.

The success of task-oriented and document-grounded dialogue systems depends on users accepting and enjoying using them. To achieve this, recently published work in the field of Human-Computer Interaction suggests that the combination of considering demographic information, user emotions and learning from the implicit feedback in their utterances, is particularly important. However, these findings have not yet been transferred to the field of Natural Language Processing, where these data are primarily studied separately. Accordingly, no sufficiently annotated dataset is available. To address this gap, we introduce FEDI, the first English dialogue dataset for task-oriented document-grounded dialogues annotated with demographic information, user emotions and implicit feedback. Our experiments with FLAN-T5, GPT-2 and LLaMA-2 show that these data have the potential to improve task completion and the factual consistency of the generated responses and user acceptance.

Transparency in AI healthcare decision-making is crucial for building trust among AI and users. Incorporating reasoning capabilities enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to understand emotions in context, handle nuanced language, and infer unstated sentiments. In this work, we introduce a new task -- Sentiment Reasoning -- for both speech and text modalities, along with our proposed multimodal multitask framework and dataset. Sentiment Reasoning is an auxiliary task in sentiment analysis where the model predicts both the sentiment label and generates the rationale behind it based on the input transcript. Our study conducted on both human transcripts and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) transcripts shows that Sentiment Reasoning helps improve model transparency by providing rationale for model prediction with quality semantically comparable to humans while also improving model performance (1% increase in both accuracy and macro-F1) via rationale-augmented fine-tuning. Also, no significant difference in the semantic quality of generated rationales between human and ASR transcripts. All code, data (English-translated and Vietnamese) and models are published online: https://github.com/leduckhai/MultiMed.

This paper addresses the problem of dialogue reasoning with contextualized commonsense inference. We curate CICERO, a dataset of dyadic conversations with five types of utterance-level reasoning-based inferences: cause, subsequent event, prerequisite, motivation, and emotional reaction. The dataset contains 53,105 of such inferences from 5,672 dialogues. We use this dataset to solve relevant generative and discriminative tasks: generation of cause and subsequent event; generation of prerequisite, motivation, and listener's emotional reaction; and selection of plausible alternatives. Our results ascertain the value of such dialogue-centric commonsense knowledge datasets. It is our hope that CICERO will open new research avenues into commonsense-based dialogue reasoning.

Evaluating the quality of a dialogue interaction between two agents is a difficult task, especially in open-domain chit-chat style dialogue. There have been recent efforts to develop automatic dialogue evaluation metrics, but most of them do not generalize to unseen datasets and/or need a human-generated reference response during inference, making it infeasible for online evaluation. Here, we propose an unreferenced automated evaluation metric that uses large pre-trained language models to extract latent representations of utterances, and leverages the temporal transitions that exist between them. We show that our model achieves higher correlation with human annotations in an online setting, while not requiring true responses for comparison during inference.

We present SODA: the first publicly available, million-scale high-quality social dialogue dataset. Using SODA, we train COSMO: a generalizable conversation agent outperforming previous best-performing agents on both in- and out-of-domain datasets. In contrast to most existing crowdsourced, small-scale dialogue corpora, we distill 1.5M socially-grounded dialogues from a pre-trained language model (InstructGPT; Ouyang et al., 2022). Dialogues are distilled by contextualizing social commonsense knowledge from a knowledge graph (Atomic10x; West et al., 2022). Human evaluation shows that dialogues in SODA are more consistent, specific, and (surprisingly) natural than prior human-authored datasets - e.g., DailyDialog (Li et al., 2017), BlendedSkillTalk (Smith et al., 2020). In addition, extensive evaluations show that COSMO is significantly more natural and consistent on unseen datasets than best-performing dialogue models - e.g., GODEL (Peng et al., 2022), BlenderBot (Roller et al., 2021), DialoGPT (Zhang et al., 2020). Furthermore, it is sometimes even preferred to the original human-written gold responses. We make our data, models, and code public.

We develop a high-quality multi-turn dialog dataset, DailyDialog, which is intriguing in several aspects. The language is human-written and less noisy. The dialogues in the dataset reflect our daily communication way and cover various topics about our daily life. We also manually label the developed dataset with communication intention and emotion information. Then, we evaluate existing approaches on DailyDialog dataset and hope it benefit the research field of dialog systems.

Despite tremendous advancements in dialogue systems, stable evaluation still requires human judgments producing notoriously high-variance metrics due to their inherent subjectivity. Moreover, methods and labels in dialogue evaluation are not fully standardized, especially for open-domain chats, with a lack of work to compare and assess the validity of those approaches. The use of inconsistent evaluation can misinform the performance of a dialogue system, which becomes a major hurdle to enhance it. Thus, a dimensional evaluation of chat-oriented open-domain dialogue systems that reliably measures several aspects of dialogue capabilities is desired. This paper presents a novel human evaluation method to estimate the rates of many dialogue system behaviors. Our method is used to evaluate four state-of-the-art open-domain dialogue systems and compared with existing approaches. The analysis demonstrates that our behavior method is more suitable than alternative Likert-style or comparative approaches for dimensional evaluation of these systems.

Recent advances in conversational AI have demonstrated impressive capabilities in single-turn responses, yet multi-turn dialogues remain challenging for even the most sophisticated language models. Current dialogue datasets are limited in their emotional range, domain diversity, turn depth, and are predominantly text-only, hindering progress in developing more human-like conversational systems across modalities. To address these limitations, we present DeepDialogue, a large-scale multimodal dataset containing 40,150 high-quality multi-turn dialogues spanning 41 domains and incorporating 20 distinct emotions with coherent emotional progressions. Our approach pairs 9 different language models (4B-72B parameters) to generate 65,600 initial conversations, which we then evaluate through a combination of human annotation and LLM-based quality filtering. The resulting dataset reveals fundamental insights: smaller models fail to maintain coherence beyond 6 dialogue turns; concrete domains (e.g., "cars," "travel") yield more meaningful conversations than abstract ones (e.g., "philosophy"); and cross-model interactions produce more coherent dialogues than same-model conversations. A key contribution of DeepDialogue is its speech component, where we synthesize emotion-consistent voices for all 40,150 dialogues, creating the first large-scale open-source multimodal dialogue dataset that faithfully preserves emotional context across multi-turn conversations.

Empathy is a complex cognitive ability based on the reasoning of others' affective states. In order to better understand others and express stronger empathy in dialogues, we argue that two issues must be tackled at the same time: (i) identifying which word is the cause for the other's emotion from his or her utterance and (ii) reflecting those specific words in the response generation. However, previous approaches for recognizing emotion cause words in text require sub-utterance level annotations, which can be demanding. Taking inspiration from social cognition, we leverage a generative estimator to infer emotion cause words from utterances with no word-level label. Also, we introduce a novel method based on pragmatics to make dialogue models focus on targeted words in the input during generation. Our method is applicable to any dialogue models with no additional training on the fly. We show our approach improves multiple best-performing dialogue agents on generating more focused empathetic responses in terms of both automatic and human evaluation.

Despite recent progress in open-domain dialogue evaluation, how to develop automatic metrics remains an open problem. We explore the potential of dialogue evaluation featuring dialog act information, which was hardly explicitly modeled in previous methods. However, defined at the utterance level in general, dialog act is of coarse granularity, as an utterance can contain multiple segments possessing different functions. Hence, we propose segment act, an extension of dialog act from utterance level to segment level, and crowdsource a large-scale dataset for it. To utilize segment act flows, sequences of segment acts, for evaluation, we develop the first consensus-based dialogue evaluation framework, FlowEval. This framework provides a reference-free approach for dialog evaluation by finding pseudo-references. Extensive experiments against strong baselines on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and other desirable characteristics of our FlowEval, pointing out a potential path for better dialogue evaluation.

While existing Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) has received extensive effort and advancement, there are still gaps in defining a more holistic research target seamlessly integrating multimodality, conversation context, fine-granularity, and also covering the changing sentiment dynamics as well as cognitive causal rationales. This paper bridges the gaps by introducing a multimodal conversational ABSA, where two novel subtasks are proposed: 1) Panoptic Sentiment Sextuple Extraction, panoramically recognizing holder, target, aspect, opinion, sentiment, rationale from multi-turn multi-party multimodal dialogue. 2) Sentiment Flipping Analysis, detecting the dynamic sentiment transformation throughout the conversation with the causal reasons. To benchmark the tasks, we construct PanoSent, a dataset annotated both manually and automatically, featuring high quality, large scale, multimodality, multilingualism, multi-scenarios, and covering both implicit and explicit sentiment elements. To effectively address the tasks, we devise a novel Chain-of-Sentiment reasoning framework, together with a novel multimodal large language model (namely Sentica) and a paraphrase-based verification mechanism. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the superiority of our methods over strong baselines, validating the efficacy of all our proposed methods. The work is expected to open up a new era for the ABSA community, and thus all our codes and data are open at https://PanoSent.github.io/

As large language models (LLMs) enter the mainstream, aligning them to foster constructive dialogue rather than exacerbate societal divisions is critical. Using an individualized and multicultural alignment dataset of over 7,500 conversations of individuals from 74 countries engaging with 21 LLMs, we examined how linguistic attributes linked to constructive interactions are reflected in human preference data used for training AI. We found that users consistently preferred well-reasoned and nuanced responses while rejecting those high in personal storytelling. However, users who believed that AI should reflect their values tended to place less preference on reasoning in LLM responses and more on curiosity. Encouragingly, we observed that users could set the tone for how constructive their conversation would be, as LLMs mirrored linguistic attributes, including toxicity, in user queries.

Neural task-oriented dialogue systems often struggle to smoothly interface with a knowledge base. In this work, we seek to address this problem by proposing a new neural dialogue agent that is able to effectively sustain grounded, multi-domain discourse through a novel key-value retrieval mechanism. The model is end-to-end differentiable and does not need to explicitly model dialogue state or belief trackers. We also release a new dataset of 3,031 dialogues that are grounded through underlying knowledge bases and span three distinct tasks in the in-car personal assistant space: calendar scheduling, weather information retrieval, and point-of-interest navigation. Our architecture is simultaneously trained on data from all domains and significantly outperforms a competitive rule-based system and other existing neural dialogue architectures on the provided domains according to both automatic and human evaluation metrics.

Moral framing and sentiment can affect a variety of online and offline behaviors, including donation, pro-environmental action, political engagement, and even participation in violent protests. Various computational methods in Natural Language Processing (NLP) have been used to detect moral sentiment from textual data, but in order to achieve better performances in such subjective tasks, large sets of hand-annotated training data are needed. Previous corpora annotated for moral sentiment have proven valuable, and have generated new insights both within NLP and across the social sciences, but have been limited to Twitter. To facilitate improving our understanding of the role of moral rhetoric, we present the Moral Foundations Reddit Corpus, a collection of 16,123 Reddit comments that have been curated from 12 distinct subreddits, hand-annotated by at least three trained annotators for 8 categories of moral sentiment (i.e., Care, Proportionality, Equality, Purity, Authority, Loyalty, Thin Morality, Implicit/Explicit Morality) based on the updated Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) framework. We use a range of methodologies to provide baseline moral-sentiment classification results for this new corpus, e.g., cross-domain classification and knowledge transfer.

Emotion recognition in conversations is a challenging task that has recently gained popularity due to its potential applications. Until now, however, a large-scale multimodal multi-party emotional conversational database containing more than two speakers per dialogue was missing. Thus, we propose the Multimodal EmotionLines Dataset (MELD), an extension and enhancement of EmotionLines. MELD contains about 13,000 utterances from 1,433 dialogues from the TV-series Friends. Each utterance is annotated with emotion and sentiment labels, and encompasses audio, visual and textual modalities. We propose several strong multimodal baselines and show the importance of contextual and multimodal information for emotion recognition in conversations. The full dataset is available for use at http:// affective-meld.github.io.

Recently, ChatGPT has drawn great attention from both the research community and the public. We are particularly curious about whether it can serve as a universal sentiment analyzer. To this end, in this work, we provide a preliminary evaluation of ChatGPT on the understanding of opinions, sentiments, and emotions contained in the text. Specifically, we evaluate it in four settings, including standard evaluation, polarity shift evaluation, open-domain evaluation, and sentiment inference evaluation. The above evaluation involves 18 benchmark datasets and 5 representative sentiment analysis tasks, and we compare ChatGPT with fine-tuned BERT and corresponding state-of-the-art (SOTA) models on end-task. Moreover, we also conduct human evaluation and present some qualitative case studies to gain a deep comprehension of its sentiment analysis capabilities.

Emotional support dialogue systems aim to reduce help-seekers' distress and help them overcome challenges. While human valuesx2013core beliefs that shape an individual's prioritiesx2013are increasingly emphasized in contemporary psychological therapy for their role in fostering internal transformation and long-term emotional well-being, their integration into emotional support systems remains underexplored. To bridge this gap, we present a value-driven method for training emotional support dialogue systems designed to reinforce positive values in seekers. Notably, our model identifies which values to reinforce at each turn and how to do so, by leveraging online support conversations from Reddit. We evaluate the method across support skills, seekers' emotional intensity, and value reinforcement. Our method consistently outperforms various baselines, effectively exploring and eliciting values from seekers. Additionally, leveraging crowd knowledge from Reddit significantly enhances its effectiveness. Therapists highlighted its ability to validate seekers' challenges and emphasize positive aspects of their situationsx2013both crucial elements of value reinforcement. Our work, being the first to integrate value reinforcement into emotional support systems, demonstrates its promise and establishes a foundation for future research.

Sentiment analysis is a pivotal task in the domain of natural language processing. It encompasses both text-level sentiment polarity classification and word-level Part of Speech(POS) sentiment polarity determination. Such analysis challenges models to understand text holistically while also extracting nuanced information. With the rise of Large Language Models(LLMs), new avenues for sentiment analysis have opened. This paper proposes enhancing performance by leveraging the Mutual Reinforcement Effect(MRE) between individual words and the overall text. It delves into how word polarity influences the overarching sentiment of a passage. To support our research, we annotated four novel Sentiment Text Classification and Part of Speech(SCPOS) datasets, building upon existing sentiment classification datasets. Furthermore, we developed a Universal Sentiment Analysis(USA) model, with a 7-billion parameter size. Experimental results revealed that our model surpassed the performance of gpt-3.5-turbo across all four datasets, underscoring the significance of MRE in sentiment analysis.

A key trait of daily conversations between individuals is the ability to express empathy towards others, and exploring ways to implement empathy is a crucial step towards human-like dialogue systems. Previous approaches on this topic mainly focus on detecting and utilizing the user's emotion for generating empathetic responses. However, since empathy includes both aspects of affection and cognition, we argue that in addition to identifying the user's emotion, cognitive understanding of the user's situation should also be considered. To this end, we propose a novel approach for empathetic response generation, which leverages commonsense to draw more information about the user's situation and uses this additional information to further enhance the empathy expression in generated responses. We evaluate our approach on EmpatheticDialogues, which is a widely-used benchmark dataset for empathetic response generation. Empirical results demonstrate that our approach outperforms the baseline models in both automatic and human evaluations and can generate more informative and empathetic responses.

Sentiment is a pervasive feature in natural language text, yet it is an open question how sentiment is represented within Large Language Models (LLMs). In this study, we reveal that across a range of models, sentiment is represented linearly: a single direction in activation space mostly captures the feature across a range of tasks with one extreme for positive and the other for negative. Through causal interventions, we isolate this direction and show it is causally relevant in both toy tasks and real world datasets such as Stanford Sentiment Treebank. Through this case study we model a thorough investigation of what a single direction means on a broad data distribution. We further uncover the mechanisms that involve this direction, highlighting the roles of a small subset of attention heads and neurons. Finally, we discover a phenomenon which we term the summarization motif: sentiment is not solely represented on emotionally charged words, but is additionally summarized at intermediate positions without inherent sentiment, such as punctuation and names. We show that in Stanford Sentiment Treebank zero-shot classification, 76% of above-chance classification accuracy is lost when ablating the sentiment direction, nearly half of which (36%) is due to ablating the summarized sentiment direction exclusively at comma positions.

Dialogue systems have been used as conversation partners in English learning, but few have studied whether these systems improve learning outcomes. Student passion and perseverance, or grit, has been associated with language learning success. Recent work establishes that as students perceive their English teachers to be more supportive, their grit improves. Hypothesizing that the same pattern applies to English-teaching chatbots, we create EDEN, a robust open-domain chatbot for spoken conversation practice that provides empathetic feedback. To construct EDEN, we first train a specialized spoken utterance grammar correction model and a high-quality social chit-chat conversation model. We then conduct a preliminary user study with a variety of strategies for empathetic feedback. Our experiment suggests that using adaptive empathetic feedback leads to higher perceived affective support. Furthermore, elements of perceived affective support positively correlate with student grit.

Uncovering latent values and opinions in large language models (LLMs) can help identify biases and mitigate potential harm. Recently, this has been approached by presenting LLMs with survey questions and quantifying their stances towards morally and politically charged statements. However, the stances generated by LLMs can vary greatly depending on how they are prompted, and there are many ways to argue for or against a given position. In this work, we propose to address this by analysing a large and robust dataset of 156k LLM responses to the 62 propositions of the Political Compass Test (PCT) generated by 6 LLMs using 420 prompt variations. We perform coarse-grained analysis of their generated stances and fine-grained analysis of the plain text justifications for those stances. For fine-grained analysis, we propose to identify tropes in the responses: semantically similar phrases that are recurrent and consistent across different prompts, revealing patterns in the text that a given LLM is prone to produce. We find that demographic features added to prompts significantly affect outcomes on the PCT, reflecting bias, as well as disparities between the results of tests when eliciting closed-form vs. open domain responses. Additionally, patterns in the plain text rationales via tropes show that similar justifications are repeatedly generated across models and prompts even with disparate stances.

We report the results of DialogSum Challenge, the shared task on summarizing real-life scenario dialogues at INLG 2022. Four teams participate in this shared task and three submit their system reports, exploring different methods to improve the performance of dialogue summarization. Although there is a great improvement over the baseline models regarding automatic evaluation metrics, such as Rouge scores, we find that there is a salient gap between model generated outputs and human annotated summaries by human evaluation from multiple aspects. These findings demonstrate the difficulty of dialogue summarization and suggest that more fine-grained evaluatuion metrics are in need.

Even though machine learning has become the major scene in dialogue research community, the real breakthrough has been blocked by the scale of data available. To address this fundamental obstacle, we introduce the Multi-Domain Wizard-of-Oz dataset (MultiWOZ), a fully-labeled collection of human-human written conversations spanning over multiple domains and topics. At a size of 10k dialogues, it is at least one order of magnitude larger than all previous annotated task-oriented corpora. The contribution of this work apart from the open-sourced dataset labelled with dialogue belief states and dialogue actions is two-fold: firstly, a detailed description of the data collection procedure along with a summary of data structure and analysis is provided. The proposed data-collection pipeline is entirely based on crowd-sourcing without the need of hiring professional annotators; secondly, a set of benchmark results of belief tracking, dialogue act and response generation is reported, which shows the usability of the data and sets a baseline for future studies.

In this paper, we introduce the Dialogue Evaluation shared task on extraction of structured opinions from Russian news texts. The task of the contest is to extract opinion tuples for a given sentence; the tuples are composed of a sentiment holder, its target, an expression and sentiment from the holder to the target. In total, the task received more than 100 submissions. The participants experimented mainly with large language models in zero-shot, few-shot and fine-tuning formats. The best result on the test set was obtained with fine-tuning of a large language model. We also compared 30 prompts and 11 open source language models with 3-32 billion parameters in the 1-shot and 10-shot settings and found the best models and prompts.

We explore unconstrained natural language feedback as a learning signal for artificial agents. Humans use rich and varied language to teach, yet most prior work on interactive learning from language assumes a particular form of input (e.g., commands). We propose a general framework which does not make this assumption, using aspect-based sentiment analysis to decompose feedback into sentiment about the features of a Markov decision process. We then perform an analogue of inverse reinforcement learning, regressing the sentiment on the features to infer the teacher's latent reward function. To evaluate our approach, we first collect a corpus of teaching behavior in a cooperative task where both teacher and learner are human. We implement three artificial learners: sentiment-based "literal" and "pragmatic" models, and an inference network trained end-to-end to predict latent rewards. We then repeat our initial experiment and pair them with human teachers. All three successfully learn from interactive human feedback. The sentiment models outperform the inference network, with the "pragmatic" model approaching human performance. Our work thus provides insight into the information structure of naturalistic linguistic feedback as well as methods to leverage it for reinforcement learning.

User Satisfaction Estimation (USE) is an important yet challenging task in goal-oriented conversational systems. Whether the user is satisfied with the system largely depends on the fulfillment of the user's needs, which can be implicitly reflected by users' dialogue acts. However, existing studies often neglect the sequential transitions of dialogue act or rely heavily on annotated dialogue act labels when utilizing dialogue acts to facilitate USE. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, namely USDA, to incorporate the sequential dynamics of dialogue acts for predicting user satisfaction, by jointly learning User Satisfaction Estimation and Dialogue Act Recognition tasks. In specific, we first employ a Hierarchical Transformer to encode the whole dialogue context, with two task-adaptive pre-training strategies to be a second-phase in-domain pre-training for enhancing the dialogue modeling ability. In terms of the availability of dialogue act labels, we further develop two variants of USDA to capture the dialogue act information in either supervised or unsupervised manners. Finally, USDA leverages the sequential transitions of both content and act features in the dialogue to predict the user satisfaction. Experimental results on four benchmark goal-oriented dialogue datasets across different applications show that the proposed method substantially and consistently outperforms existing methods on USE, and validate the important role of dialogue act sequences in USE.

Emotion expression is one of the essential traits of conversations. It may be self-related or caused by another speaker. The variety of reasons may serve as a source of the further emotion causes: conversation history, speaker's emotional state, etc. Inspired by the most recent advances in Chain-of-Thought, in this work, we exploit the existing three-hop reasoning approach (THOR) to perform large language model instruction-tuning for answering: emotion states (THOR-state), and emotion caused by one speaker to the other (THOR-cause). We equip THOR-cause with the reasoning revision (rr) for devising a reasoning path in fine-tuning. In particular, we rely on the annotated speaker emotion states to revise reasoning path. Our final submission, based on Flan-T5-base (250M) and the rule-based span correction technique, preliminary tuned with THOR-state and fine-tuned with THOR-cause-rr on competition training data, results in 3rd and 4th places (F1-proportional) and 5th place (F1-strict) among 15 participating teams. Our THOR implementation fork is publicly available: https://github.com/nicolay-r/THOR-ECAC

Dialogue assessment plays a critical role in the development of open-domain dialogue systems. Existing work are uncapable of providing an end-to-end and human-epistemic assessment dataset, while they only provide sub-metrics like coherence or the dialogues are conversed between annotators far from real user settings. In this paper, we release a large-scale dialogue quality assessment dataset (DiQAD), for automatically assessing open-domain dialogue quality. Specifically, we (1) establish the assessment criteria based on the dimensions conforming to human judgements on dialogue qualities, and (2) annotate large-scale dialogues that conversed between real users based on these annotation criteria, which contains around 100,000 dialogues. We conduct several experiments and report the performances of the baselines as the benchmark on DiQAD. The dataset is openly accessible at https://github.com/yukunZhao/Dataset_Dialogue_quality_evaluation.

Today, large language models are widely used as judges to evaluate responses from other language models. Hence, it is imperative to benchmark and improve these LLM-judges on real-world language model usage: a typical human-assistant conversation is lengthy, and shows significant diversity in topics, intents, and requirements across turns, e.g. social interactions, task requests, feedback. We present Amulet, a framework that leverages pertinent linguistic concepts of dialog-acts and maxims to improve the accuracy of LLM-judges on preference data with complex, multi-turn conversational context. Amulet presents valuable insights about (a) the communicative structures and intents present in the conversation (dialog acts), and (b) the satisfaction of conversational principles (maxims) by the preference responses, and uses them to make judgments. On four challenging datasets, Amulet shows that (a) humans frequently (60 to 70 percent of the time) change their intents from one turn of the conversation to the next, and (b) in 75 percent of instances, the preference responses can be differentiated via dialog acts and/or maxims, reiterating the latter's significance in judging such data. Amulet can be used either as a judge by applying the framework to a single LLM, or integrated into a jury with different LLM judges; our judges and juries show strong improvements on relevant baselines for all four datasets.

This paper presents Att-HACK, the first large database of acted speech with social attitudes. Available databases of expressive speech are rare and very often restricted to the primary emotions: anger, joy, sadness, fear. This greatly limits the scope of the research on expressive speech. Besides, a fundamental aspect of speech prosody is always ignored and missing from such databases: its variety, i.e. the possibility to repeat an utterance while varying its prosody. This paper represents a first attempt to widen the scope of expressivity in speech, by providing a database of acted speech with social attitudes: friendly, seductive, dominant, and distant. The proposed database comprises 25 speakers interpreting 100 utterances in 4 social attitudes, with 3-5 repetitions each per attitude for a total of around 30 hours of speech. The Att-HACK is freely available for academic research under a Creative Commons Licence.

Few-shot dialogue state tracking (DST) with Large Language Models (LLM) relies on an effective and efficient conversation retriever to find similar in-context examples for prompt learning. Previous works use raw dialogue context as search keys and queries, and a retriever is fine-tuned with annotated dialogues to achieve superior performance. However, the approach is less suited for scaling to new domains or new annotation languages, where fine-tuning data is unavailable. To address this problem, we handle the task of conversation retrieval based on text summaries of the conversations. A LLM-based conversation summarizer is adopted for query and key generation, which enables effective maximum inner product search. To avoid the extra inference cost brought by LLM-based conversation summarization, we further distill a light-weight conversation encoder which produces query embeddings without decoding summaries for test conversations. We validate our retrieval approach on MultiWOZ datasets with GPT-Neo-2.7B and LLaMA-7B/30B. The experimental results show a significant improvement over relevant baselines in real few-shot DST settings.

Despite recent advancements in language models (LMs), their application to dialogue management (DM) problems and ability to carry on rich conversations remain a challenge. We use reinforcement learning (RL) to develop a dialogue agent that avoids being short-sighted (outputting generic utterances) and maximizes overall user satisfaction. Most existing RL approaches to DM train the agent at the word-level, and thus, have to deal with a combinatorially complex action space even for a medium-size vocabulary. As a result, they struggle to produce a successful and engaging dialogue even if they are warm-started with a pre-trained LM. To address this issue, we develop a RL-based DM using a novel mixture of expert language model (MoE-LM) that consists of (i) a LM capable of learning diverse semantics for conversation histories, (ii) a number of {\em specialized} LMs (or experts) capable of generating utterances corresponding to a particular attribute or personality, and (iii) a RL-based DM that performs dialogue planning with the utterances generated by the experts. Our MoE approach provides greater flexibility to generate sensible utterances with different intents and allows RL to focus on conversational-level DM. We compare it with SOTA baselines on open-domain dialogues and demonstrate its effectiveness both in terms of the diversity and sensibility of the generated utterances and the overall DM performance.

Do state-of-the-art natural language understanding models care about word order - one of the most important characteristics of a sequence? Not always! We found 75% to 90% of the correct predictions of BERT-based classifiers, trained on many GLUE tasks, remain constant after input words are randomly shuffled. Despite BERT embeddings are famously contextual, the contribution of each individual word to downstream tasks is almost unchanged even after the word's context is shuffled. BERT-based models are able to exploit superficial cues (e.g. the sentiment of keywords in sentiment analysis; or the word-wise similarity between sequence-pair inputs in natural language inference) to make correct decisions when tokens are arranged in random orders. Encouraging classifiers to capture word order information improves the performance on most GLUE tasks, SQuAD 2.0 and out-of-samples. Our work suggests that many GLUE tasks are not challenging machines to understand the meaning of a sentence.

Pre-trained language models based on general text enable huge success in the NLP scenario. But the intrinsical difference of linguistic patterns between general text and task-oriented dialogues makes existing pre-trained language models less useful in practice. Current dialogue pre-training methods rely on a contrastive framework and face the challenges of both selecting true positives and hard negatives. In this paper, we propose a novel dialogue pre-training model, FutureTOD, which distills future knowledge to the representation of the previous dialogue context using a self-training framework. Our intuition is that a good dialogue representation both learns local context information and predicts future information. Extensive experiments on diverse downstream dialogue tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our model, especially the generalization, robustness, and learning discriminative dialogue representations capabilities.

The traditional Dialogue State Tracking (DST) problem aims to track user preferences and intents in user-agent conversations. While sufficient for task-oriented dialogue systems supporting narrow domain applications, the advent of Large Language Model (LLM)-based chat systems has introduced many real-world intricacies in open-domain dialogues. These intricacies manifest in the form of increased complexity in contextual interactions, extended dialogue sessions encompassing a diverse array of topics, and more frequent contextual shifts. To handle these intricacies arising from evolving LLM-based chat systems, we propose joint dialogue segmentation and state tracking per segment in open-domain dialogue systems. Assuming a zero-shot setting appropriate to a true open-domain dialogue system, we propose S3-DST, a structured prompting technique that harnesses Pre-Analytical Recollection, a novel grounding mechanism we designed for improving long context tracking. To demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed approach in joint segmentation and state tracking, we evaluate S3-DST on a proprietary anonymized open-domain dialogue dataset, as well as publicly available DST and segmentation datasets. Across all datasets and settings, S3-DST consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art, demonstrating its potency and robustness the next generation of LLM-based chat systems.

Expression of sentiment in parliamentary debates is deemed to be significantly different from that on social media or in product reviews. This paper adds to an emerging body of research on parliamentary debates with a dataset of sentences annotated for detection sentiment polarity in political discourse. We sample the sentences for annotation from the proceedings of three Southeast European parliaments: Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Serbia. A six-level schema is applied to the data with the aim of training a classification model for the detection of sentiment in parliamentary proceedings. Krippendorff's alpha measuring the inter-annotator agreement ranges from 0.6 for the six-level annotation schema to 0.75 for the three-level schema and 0.83 for the two-level schema. Our initial experiments on the dataset show that transformer models perform significantly better than those using a simpler architecture. Furthermore, regardless of the similarity of the three languages, we observe differences in performance across different languages. Performing parliament-specific training and evaluation shows that the main reason for the differing performance between parliaments seems to be the different complexity of the automatic classification task, which is not observable in annotator performance. Language distance does not seem to play any role neither in annotator nor in automatic classification performance. We release the dataset and the best-performing model under permissive licences.

Dialogue systems are usually categorized into two types, open-domain and task-oriented. The first one focuses on chatting with users and making them engage in the conversations, where selecting a proper topic to fit the dialogue context is essential for a successful dialogue. The other one focuses on a specific task instead of casual talks, e.g., finding a movie on Friday night, or playing a song. These two directions have been studied separately due to their different purposes. However, how smoothly transitioning from social chatting to task-oriented dialogues is important for triggering business opportunities, and there is no public data focusing on such scenarios. Hence, this paper focuses on investigating the conversations starting from open-domain social chatting and then gradually transitioning to task-oriented purposes, and releases a large-scale dataset with detailed annotations for encouraging this research direction. To achieve this goal, this paper proposes a framework to automatically generate many dialogues without human involvement, in which any powerful open-domain dialogue generation model can be easily leveraged. The human evaluation shows that our generated dialogue data has a natural flow at a reasonable quality, showing that our released data has a great potential of guiding future research directions and commercial activities. Furthermore, the released models allow researchers to automatically generate unlimited dialogues in the target scenarios, which can greatly benefit semi-supervised and unsupervised approaches.

This paper summarizes our submission to Task 2 of the second track of the 10th Dialog System Technology Challenge (DSTC10) "Knowledge-grounded Task-oriented Dialogue Modeling on Spoken Conversations". Similar to the previous year's iteration, the task consists of three subtasks: detecting whether a turn is knowledge seeking, selecting the relevant knowledge document and finally generating a grounded response. This year, the focus lies on adapting the system to noisy ASR transcripts. We explore different approaches to make the models more robust to this type of input and to adapt the generated responses to the style of spoken conversations. For the latter, we get the best results with a noisy channel model that additionally reduces the number of short and generic responses. Our best system achieved the 1st rank in the automatic and the 3rd rank in the human evaluation of the challenge.

Empathetic conversation is psychologically supposed to be the result of conscious alignment and interaction between the cognition and affection of empathy. However, existing empathetic dialogue models usually consider only the affective aspect or treat cognition and affection in isolation, which limits the capability of empathetic response generation. In this work, we propose the CASE model for empathetic dialogue generation. It first builds upon a commonsense cognition graph and an emotional concept graph and then aligns the user's cognition and affection at both the coarse-grained and fine-grained levels. Through automatic and manual evaluation, we demonstrate that CASE outperforms state-of-the-art baselines of empathetic dialogues and can generate more empathetic and informative responses.

Algorithms for text-generation in dialogue can be misguided. For example, in task-oriented settings, reinforcement learning that optimizes only task-success can lead to abysmal lexical diversity. We hypothesize this is due to poor theoretical understanding of the objectives in text-generation and their relation to the learning process (i.e., model training). To this end, we propose a new theoretical framework for learning to generate text in dialogue. Compared to existing theories of learning, our framework allows for analysis of the multi-faceted goals inherent to text-generation. We use our framework to develop theoretical guarantees for learners that adapt to unseen data. As an example, we apply our theory to study data-shift within a cooperative learning algorithm proposed for the GuessWhat?! visual dialogue game. From this insight, we propose a new algorithm, and empirically, we demonstrate our proposal improves both task-success and human-likeness of the generated text. Finally, we show statistics from our theory are empirically predictive of multiple qualities of the generated dialogue, suggesting our theory is useful for model-selection when human evaluations are not available.

We introduce Affective Visual Dialog, an emotion explanation and reasoning task as a testbed for research on understanding the formation of emotions in visually grounded conversations. The task involves three skills: (1) Dialog-based Question Answering (2) Dialog-based Emotion Prediction and (3) Affective emotion explanation generation based on the dialog. Our key contribution is the collection of a large-scale dataset, dubbed AffectVisDial, consisting of 50K 10-turn visually grounded dialogs as well as concluding emotion attributions and dialog-informed textual emotion explanations, resulting in a total of 27,180 working hours. We explain our design decisions in collecting the dataset and introduce the questioner and answerer tasks that are associated with the participants in the conversation. We train and demonstrate solid Affective Visual Dialog baselines adapted from state-of-the-art models. Remarkably, the responses generated by our models show promising emotional reasoning abilities in response to visually grounded conversations. Our project page is available at https://affective-visual-dialog.github.io.

Dialogue systems need to deal with the unpredictability of user intents to track dialogue state and the heterogeneity of slots to understand user preferences. In this paper we investigate the hypothesis that solving these challenges as one unified model will allow the transfer of parameter support data across the different tasks. The proposed principled model is based on a Transformer encoder, trained on multiple tasks, and leveraged by a rich input that conditions the model on the target inferences. Conditioning the Transformer encoder on multiple target inferences over the same corpus, i.e., intent and multiple slot types, allows learning richer language interactions than a single-task model would be able to. In fact, experimental results demonstrate that conditioning the model on an increasing number of dialogue inference tasks leads to improved results: on the MultiWOZ dataset, the joint intent and slot detection can be improved by 3.2\% by conditioning on intent, 10.8\% by conditioning on slot and 14.4\% by conditioning on both intent and slots. Moreover, on real conversations with Farfetch costumers, the proposed conditioned BERT can achieve high joint-goal and intent detection performance throughout a dialogue.

Feeling emotion is a critical characteristic to distinguish people from machines. Among all the multi-modal resources for emotion detection, textual datasets are those containing the least additional information in addition to semantics, and hence are adopted widely for testing the developed systems. However, most of the textual emotional datasets consist of emotion labels of only individual words, sentences or documents, which makes it challenging to discuss the contextual flow of emotions. In this paper, we introduce EmotionLines, the first dataset with emotions labeling on all utterances in each dialogue only based on their textual content. Dialogues in EmotionLines are collected from Friends TV scripts and private Facebook messenger dialogues. Then one of seven emotions, six Ekman's basic emotions plus the neutral emotion, is labeled on each utterance by 5 Amazon MTurkers. A total of 29,245 utterances from 2,000 dialogues are labeled in EmotionLines. We also provide several strong baselines for emotion detection models on EmotionLines in this paper.

There are many settings where it is useful to predict and explain the success or failure of a dialogue. Circumplex theory from psychology models the social orientations (e.g., Warm-Agreeable, Arrogant-Calculating) of conversation participants and can be used to predict and explain the outcome of social interactions. Our work is novel in its systematic application of social orientation tags to modeling conversation outcomes. In this paper, we introduce a new data set of dialogue utterances machine-labeled with social orientation tags. We show that social orientation tags improve task performance, especially in low-resource settings, on both English and Chinese language benchmarks. We also demonstrate how social orientation tags help explain the outcomes of social interactions when used in neural models. Based on these results showing the utility of social orientation tags for dialogue outcome prediction tasks, we release our data sets, code, and models that are fine-tuned to predict social orientation tags on dialogue utterances.

The recently released artificial intelligence conversational agent, ChatGPT, has gained significant attention in academia and real life. A multitude of early ChatGPT users eagerly explore its capabilities and share their opinions on it via social media. Both user queries and social media posts express public concerns regarding this advanced dialogue system. To mine public concerns about ChatGPT, a novel Self-Supervised neural Topic Model (SSTM), which formalizes topic modeling as a representation learning procedure, is proposed in this paper. Extensive experiments have been conducted on Twitter posts about ChatGPT and queries asked by ChatGPT users. And experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach could extract higher quality public concerns with improved interpretability and diversity, surpassing the performance of state-of-the-art approaches.

Recently, sentiment analysis has seen remarkable advance with the help of pre-training approaches. However, sentiment knowledge, such as sentiment words and aspect-sentiment pairs, is ignored in the process of pre-training, despite the fact that they are widely used in traditional sentiment analysis approaches. In this paper, we introduce Sentiment Knowledge Enhanced Pre-training (SKEP) in order to learn a unified sentiment representation for multiple sentiment analysis tasks. With the help of automatically-mined knowledge, SKEP conducts sentiment masking and constructs three sentiment knowledge prediction objectives, so as to embed sentiment information at the word, polarity and aspect level into pre-trained sentiment representation. In particular, the prediction of aspect-sentiment pairs is converted into multi-label classification, aiming to capture the dependency between words in a pair. Experiments on three kinds of sentiment tasks show that SKEP significantly outperforms strong pre-training baseline, and achieves new state-of-the-art results on most of the test datasets. We release our code at https://github.com/baidu/Senta.

Morality in dialogue systems has raised great attention in research recently. A moral dialogue system aligned with users' values could enhance conversation engagement and user connections. In this paper, we propose a framework, MoralDial to train and evaluate moral dialogue systems. In our framework, we first explore the communication mechanisms of morality and resolve expressed morality into three parts, which indicate the roadmap for building a moral dialogue system. Based on that, we design a simple yet effective method: constructing moral discussions between simulated specific users and the dialogue system. The constructed discussions consist of expressing, explaining, revising, and inferring moral views in dialogue exchanges, which makes conversational models learn morality well in a natural manner. Furthermore, we propose a novel evaluation method under the framework. We evaluate the multiple aspects of morality by judging the relation between dialogue responses and human values in discussions, where the multifaceted nature of morality is particularly considered. Automatic and manual experiments demonstrate that our framework is promising to train and evaluate moral dialogue systems.

Financial sentiment analysis plays a crucial role in decoding market trends and guiding strategic trading decisions. Despite the deployment of advanced deep learning techniques and language models to refine sentiment analysis in finance, this study breaks new ground by investigating the potential of large language models, particularly ChatGPT 3.5, in financial sentiment analysis, with a strong emphasis on the foreign exchange market (forex). Employing a zero-shot prompting approach, we examine multiple ChatGPT prompts on a meticulously curated dataset of forex-related news headlines, measuring performance using metrics such as precision, recall, f1-score, and Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of the sentiment class. Additionally, we probe the correlation between predicted sentiment and market returns as an additional evaluation approach. ChatGPT, compared to FinBERT, a well-established sentiment analysis model for financial texts, exhibited approximately 35\% enhanced performance in sentiment classification and a 36\% higher correlation with market returns. By underlining the significance of prompt engineering, particularly in zero-shot contexts, this study spotlights ChatGPT's potential to substantially boost sentiment analysis in financial applications. By sharing the utilized dataset, our intention is to stimulate further research and advancements in the field of financial services.

A movie that is thoroughly enjoyed and recommended by an individual might be hated by another. One characteristic of humans is the ability to have feelings which could be positive or negative. To automatically classify and study human feelings, an aspect of natural language processing, sentiment analysis and opinion mining were designed to understand human feelings regarding several issues which could affect a product, a social media platforms, government, or societal discussions or even movies. Several works on sentiment analysis have been done on high resource languages while low resources languages like Yoruba have been sidelined. Due to the scarcity of datasets and linguistic architectures that will suit low resource languages, African languages "low resource languages" have been ignored and not fully explored. For this reason, our attention is placed on Yoruba to explore sentiment analysis on reviews of Nigerian movies. The data comprised 1500 movie reviews that were sourced from IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes, Letterboxd, Cinemapointer and Nollyrated. We develop sentiment classification models using the state-of-the-art pre-trained language models like mBERT and AfriBERTa to classify the movie reviews.

Dialogue is an essential part of human communication and cooperation. Existing research mainly focuses on short dialogue scenarios in a one-on-one fashion. However, multi-person interactions in the real world, such as meetings or interviews, are frequently over a few thousand words. There is still a lack of corresponding research and powerful tools to understand and process such long dialogues. Therefore, in this work, we present a pre-training framework for long dialogue understanding and summarization. Considering the nature of long conversations, we propose a window-based denoising approach for generative pre-training. For a dialogue, it corrupts a window of text with dialogue-inspired noise, and guides the model to reconstruct this window based on the content of the remaining conversation. Furthermore, to process longer input, we augment the model with sparse attention which is combined with conventional attention in a hybrid manner. We conduct extensive experiments on five datasets of long dialogues, covering tasks of dialogue summarization, abstractive question answering and topic segmentation. Experimentally, we show that our pre-trained model DialogLM significantly surpasses the state-of-the-art models across datasets and tasks. Source code and all the pre-trained models are available on our GitHub repository (https://github.com/microsoft/DialogLM).

Despite advancements in conversational AI, language models encounter challenges to handle diverse conversational tasks, and existing dialogue dataset collections often lack diversity and comprehensiveness. To tackle these issues, we introduce DialogStudio: the largest and most diverse collection of dialogue datasets, unified under a consistent format while preserving their original information. Our collection encompasses data from open-domain dialogues, task-oriented dialogues, natural language understanding, conversational recommendation, dialogue summarization, and knowledge-grounded dialogues, making it an incredibly rich and diverse resource for dialogue research and model training. To further enhance the utility of DialogStudio, we identify the licenses for each dataset and design domain-aware prompts for selected dialogues to facilitate instruction-aware fine-tuning. Furthermore, we develop conversational AI models using the dataset collection, and our experiments in both zero-shot and few-shot learning scenarios demonstrate the superiority of DialogStudio. To improve transparency and support dataset and task-based research, as well as language model pre-training, all datasets, licenses, codes, and models associated with DialogStudio are made publicly accessible at https://github.com/salesforce/DialogStudio

We have a Christmas gift for Harry Potter fans all over the world. In this paper, we present Harry Potter Dialogue (HPD), a dataset that helps train Harry Potter-like dialogue agents. Such a task is typically viewed as a variant of personalized dialogue agents, but they differ significantly in three respects: 1) Harry lived in a virtual world of wizards, thus, real-world commonsense may not apply to Harry's conversations; 2) Harry's behavior is strongly linked to background information in conversations: the scene, its attributes and its relationship to other speakers; and 3) Such backgrounds are dynamically altered as the storyline goes on. The HPD dataset, as the first dataset to facilitate the study of dialogue agent construction for characters within a story, provides rich contextual information about each dialogue session such as scenes, character attributes, and relations. More importantly, all the background information will change over the course of the story. In addition, HPD could support both dialogue generation and retrieval tasks. We evaluate baselines such as Dialog-GPT and BOB to determine the extent to which they can generate Harry Potter-like responses. The experimental results disappoint us in that although the generated responses are fluent, they still seem out of character for Harry. Besides, we validate the current most robust dialogue agent, ChatGPT, which also can't generate plausible Harry-Potter-like responses in some cases, either. Our results suggest that there is much scope for future research.

Sentiment analysis is a well-established natural language processing task, with sentiment polarity classification being one of its most popular and representative tasks. However, despite the success of pre-trained language models in this area, they often fall short of capturing the broader complexities of sentiment analysis. To address this issue, we propose a new task called Sentiment and Opinion Understanding of Language (SOUL). SOUL aims to evaluate sentiment understanding through two subtasks: Review Comprehension (RC) and Justification Generation (JG). RC seeks to validate statements that focus on subjective information based on a review text, while JG requires models to provide explanations for their sentiment predictions. To enable comprehensive evaluation, we annotate a new dataset comprising 15,028 statements from 3,638 reviews. Experimental results indicate that SOUL is a challenging task for both small and large language models, with a performance gap of up to 27% when compared to human performance. Furthermore, evaluations conducted with both human experts and GPT-4 highlight the limitations of the small language model in generating reasoning-based justifications. These findings underscore the challenging nature of the SOUL task for existing models, emphasizing the need for further advancements in sentiment analysis to address its complexities. The new dataset and code are available at https://github.com/DAMO-NLP-SG/SOUL.

One challenge for dialogue agents is recognizing feelings in the conversation partner and replying accordingly, a key communicative skill. While it is straightforward for humans to recognize and acknowledge others' feelings in a conversation, this is a significant challenge for AI systems due to the paucity of suitable publicly-available datasets for training and evaluation. This work proposes a new benchmark for empathetic dialogue generation and EmpatheticDialogues, a novel dataset of 25k conversations grounded in emotional situations. Our experiments indicate that dialogue models that use our dataset are perceived to be more empathetic by human evaluators, compared to models merely trained on large-scale Internet conversation data. We also present empirical comparisons of dialogue model adaptations for empathetic responding, leveraging existing models or datasets without requiring lengthy re-training of the full model.

Despite end-to-end neural systems making significant progress in the last decade for task-oriented as well as chit-chat based dialogue systems, most dialogue systems rely on hybrid approaches which use a combination of rule-based, retrieval and generative approaches for generating a set of ranked responses. Such dialogue systems need to rely on a fallback mechanism to respond to out-of-domain or novel user queries which are not answerable within the scope of the dialog system. While, dialog systems today rely on static and unnatural responses like "I don't know the answer to that question" or "I'm not sure about that", we design a neural approach which generates responses which are contextually aware with the user query as well as say no to the user. Such customized responses provide paraphrasing ability and contextualization as well as improve the interaction with the user and reduce dialogue monotonicity. Our simple approach makes use of rules over dependency parses and a text-to-text transformer fine-tuned on synthetic data of question-response pairs generating highly relevant, grammatical as well as diverse questions. We perform automatic and manual evaluations to demonstrate the efficacy of the system.

We present the first human-annotated dialogue-based relation extraction (RE) dataset DialogRE, aiming to support the prediction of relation(s) between two arguments that appear in a dialogue. We further offer DialogRE as a platform for studying cross-sentence RE as most facts span multiple sentences. We argue that speaker-related information plays a critical role in the proposed task, based on an analysis of similarities and differences between dialogue-based and traditional RE tasks. Considering the timeliness of communication in a dialogue, we design a new metric to evaluate the performance of RE methods in a conversational setting and investigate the performance of several representative RE methods on DialogRE. Experimental results demonstrate that a speaker-aware extension on the best-performing model leads to gains in both the standard and conversational evaluation settings. DialogRE is available at https://dataset.org/dialogre/.

Dialogue act recognition is an important part of natural language understanding. We investigate the way dialogue act corpora are annotated and the learning approaches used so far. We find that the dialogue act is context-sensitive within the conversation for most of the classes. Nevertheless, previous models of dialogue act classification work on the utterance-level and only very few consider context. We propose a novel context-based learning method to classify dialogue acts using a character-level language model utterance representation, and we notice significant improvement. We evaluate this method on the Switchboard Dialogue Act corpus, and our results show that the consideration of the preceding utterances as a context of the current utterance improves dialogue act detection.

Existing persona-grounded dialog models often fail to capture simple implications of given persona descriptions, something which humans are able to do seamlessly. For example, state-of-the-art models cannot infer that interest in hiking might imply love for nature or longing for a break. In this paper, we propose to expand available persona sentences using existing commonsense knowledge bases and paraphrasing resources to imbue dialog models with access to an expanded and richer set of persona descriptions. Additionally, we introduce fine-grained grounding on personas by encouraging the model to make a discrete choice among persona sentences while synthesizing a dialog response. Since such a choice is not observed in the data, we model it using a discrete latent random variable and use variational learning to sample from hundreds of persona expansions. Our model outperforms competitive baselines on the PersonaChat dataset in terms of dialog quality and diversity while achieving persona-consistent and controllable dialog generation.

A good conversation requires balance -- between simplicity and detail; staying on topic and changing it; asking questions and answering them. Although dialogue agents are commonly evaluated via human judgments of overall quality, the relationship between quality and these individual factors is less well-studied. In this work, we examine two controllable neural text generation methods, conditional training and weighted decoding, in order to control four important attributes for chitchat dialogue: repetition, specificity, response-relatedness and question-asking. We conduct a large-scale human evaluation to measure the effect of these control parameters on multi-turn interactive conversations on the PersonaChat task. We provide a detailed analysis of their relationship to high-level aspects of conversation, and show that by controlling combinations of these variables our models obtain clear improvements in human quality judgments.

We present a systematic study of biases in natural language generation (NLG) by analyzing text generated from prompts that contain mentions of different demographic groups. In this work, we introduce the notion of the regard towards a demographic, use the varying levels of regard towards different demographics as a defining metric for bias in NLG, and analyze the extent to which sentiment scores are a relevant proxy metric for regard. To this end, we collect strategically-generated text from language models and manually annotate the text with both sentiment and regard scores. Additionally, we build an automatic regard classifier through transfer learning, so that we can analyze biases in unseen text. Together, these methods reveal the extent of the biased nature of language model generations. Our analysis provides a study of biases in NLG, bias metrics and correlated human judgments, and empirical evidence on the usefulness of our annotated dataset.

There has been an increasing research interest in developing specialized dialogue systems that can offer mental health support. However, gathering large-scale and real-life multi-turn conversations for mental health support poses challenges due to the sensitivity of personal information, as well as the time and cost involved. To address these issues, we introduce the SMILE approach, an inclusive language expansion technique that employs ChatGPT to extend public single-turn dialogues into multi-turn ones. Our research first presents a preliminary exploratory study that validates the effectiveness of the SMILE approach. Furthermore, we conduct a comprehensive and systematic contrastive analysis of datasets generated with and without the SMILE approach, demonstrating that the SMILE method results in a large-scale, diverse, and close-to-real-life multi-turn mental health support conversation corpus, including dialog topics, lexical and semantic features. Finally, we use the collected corpus (SMILECHAT) to develop a more effective dialogue system that offers emotional support and constructive suggestions in multi-turn conversations for mental health support.

Open-domain dialogue systems aim to generate relevant, informative and engaging responses. Seq2seq neural response generation approaches do not have explicit mechanisms to control the content or style of the generated response, and frequently result in uninformative utterances. In this paper, we propose using a dialogue policy to plan the content and style of target responses in the form of an action plan, which includes knowledge sentences related to the dialogue context, targeted dialogue acts, topic information, etc. The attributes within the action plan are obtained by automatically annotating the publicly released Topical-Chat dataset. We condition neural response generators on the action plan which is then realized as target utterances at the turn and sentence levels. We also investigate different dialogue policy models to predict an action plan given the dialogue context. Through automated and human evaluation, we measure the appropriateness of the generated responses and check if the generation models indeed learn to realize the given action plans. We demonstrate that a basic dialogue policy that operates at the sentence level generates better responses in comparison to turn level generation as well as baseline models with no action plan. Additionally the basic dialogue policy has the added effect of controllability.

We argue that enabling human-AI dialogue, purposed to support joint reasoning (i.e., 'inquiry'), is important for ensuring that AI decision making is aligned with human values and preferences. In particular, we point to logic-based models of argumentation and dialogue, and suggest that the traditional focus on persuasion dialogues be replaced by a focus on inquiry dialogues, and the distinct challenges that joint inquiry raises. Given recent dramatic advances in the performance of large language models (LLMs), and the anticipated increase in their use for decision making, we provide a roadmap for research into inquiry dialogues for supporting joint human-LLM reasoning tasks that are ethically salient, and that thereby require that decisions are value aligned.

Current dialogue research primarily studies pairwise (two-party) conversations, and does not address the everyday setting where more than two speakers converse together. In this work, we both collect and evaluate multi-party conversations to study this more general case. We use the LIGHT environment to construct grounded conversations, where each participant has an assigned character to role-play. We thus evaluate the ability of language models to act as one or more characters in such conversations. Models require two skills that pairwise-trained models appear to lack: (1) being able to decide when to talk; (2) producing coherent utterances grounded on multiple characters. We compare models trained on our new dataset to existing pairwise-trained dialogue models, as well as large language models with few-shot prompting. We find that our new dataset, MultiLIGHT, which we will publicly release, can help bring significant improvements in the group setting.

In recent years, pretrained language models have revolutionized the NLP world, while achieving state of the art performance in various downstream tasks. However, in many cases, these models do not perform well when labeled data is scarce and the model is expected to perform in the zero or few shot setting. Recently, several works have shown that continual pretraining or performing a second phase of pretraining (inter-training) which is better aligned with the downstream task, can lead to improved results, especially in the scarce data setting. Here, we propose to leverage sentiment-carrying discourse markers to generate large-scale weakly-labeled data, which in turn can be used to adapt language models for sentiment analysis. Extensive experimental results show the value of our approach on various benchmark datasets, including the finance domain. Code, models and data are available at https://github.com/ibm/tslm-discourse-markers.

Collecting and annotating task-oriented dialogues is time-consuming and costly; thus, zero and few shot learning could greatly benefit dialogue state tracking (DST). In this work, we propose an in-context learning (ICL) framework for zero-shot and few-shot learning DST, where a large pre-trained language model (LM) takes a test instance and a few exemplars as input, and directly decodes the dialogue state without any parameter updates. To better leverage a tabular domain description in the LM prompt, we reformulate DST into a text-to-SQL problem. We also propose a novel approach to retrieve annotated dialogues as exemplars. Empirical results on MultiWOZ show that our method IC-DST substantially outperforms previous fine-tuned state-of-the-art models in few-shot settings. In addition, we test IC-DST in zero-shot settings, in which the model only takes a fixed task instruction as input, finding that it outperforms previous zero-shot methods by a large margin.

This paper introduces the Ubuntu Dialogue Corpus, a dataset containing almost 1 million multi-turn dialogues, with a total of over 7 million utterances and 100 million words. This provides a unique resource for research into building dialogue managers based on neural language models that can make use of large amounts of unlabeled data. The dataset has both the multi-turn property of conversations in the Dialog State Tracking Challenge datasets, and the unstructured nature of interactions from microblog services such as Twitter. We also describe two neural learning architectures suitable for analyzing this dataset, and provide benchmark performance on the task of selecting the best next response.

Evaluation is crucial in the development process of task-oriented dialogue systems. As an evaluation method, user simulation allows us to tackle issues such as scalability and cost-efficiency, making it a viable choice for large-scale automatic evaluation. To help build a human-like user simulator that can measure the quality of a dialogue, we propose the following task: simulating user satisfaction for the evaluation of task-oriented dialogue systems. The purpose of the task is to increase the evaluation power of user simulations and to make the simulation more human-like. To overcome a lack of annotated data, we propose a user satisfaction annotation dataset, USS, that includes 6,800 dialogues sampled from multiple domains, spanning real-world e-commerce dialogues, task-oriented dialogues constructed through Wizard-of-Oz experiments, and movie recommendation dialogues. All user utterances in those dialogues, as well as the dialogues themselves, have been labeled based on a 5-level satisfaction scale. We also share three baseline methods for user satisfaction prediction and action prediction tasks. Experiments conducted on the USS dataset suggest that distributed representations outperform feature-based methods. A model based on hierarchical GRUs achieves the best performance in in-domain user satisfaction prediction, while a BERT-based model has better cross-domain generalization ability.

We study a symmetric collaborative dialogue setting in which two agents, each with private knowledge, must strategically communicate to achieve a common goal. The open-ended dialogue state in this setting poses new challenges for existing dialogue systems. We collected a dataset of 11K human-human dialogues, which exhibits interesting lexical, semantic, and strategic elements. To model both structured knowledge and unstructured language, we propose a neural model with dynamic knowledge graph embeddings that evolve as the dialogue progresses. Automatic and human evaluations show that our model is both more effective at achieving the goal and more human-like than baseline neural and rule-based models.

Recent advances in neural approaches greatly improve task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems which assist users to accomplish their goals. However, such systems rely on costly manually labeled dialogs which are not available in practical scenarios. In this paper, we present our models for Track 2 of the SereTOD 2022 challenge, which is the first challenge of building semi-supervised and reinforced TOD systems on a large-scale real-world Chinese TOD dataset MobileCS. We build a knowledge-grounded dialog model to formulate dialog history and local KB as input and predict the system response. And we perform semi-supervised pre-training both on the labeled and unlabeled data. Our system achieves the first place both in the automatic evaluation and human interaction, especially with higher BLEU (+7.64) and Success (+13.6\%) than the second place.

Sentiments inherently drive politics. How we receive and process information plays an essential role in political decision-making, shaping our judgment with strategic consequences both on the level of legislators and the masses. If sentiment plays such an important role in politics, how can we study and measure it systematically? The paper presents a new dataset of sentiment-annotated sentences, which are used in a series of experiments focused on training a robust sentiment classifier for parliamentary proceedings. The paper also introduces the first domain-specific LLM for political science applications additionally pre-trained on 1.72 billion domain-specific words from proceedings of 27 European parliaments. We present experiments demonstrating how the additional pre-training of LLM on parliamentary data can significantly improve the model downstream performance on the domain-specific tasks, in our case, sentiment detection in parliamentary proceedings. We further show that multilingual models perform very well on unseen languages and that additional data from other languages significantly improves the target parliament's results. The paper makes an important contribution to multiple domains of social sciences and bridges them with computer science and computational linguistics. Lastly, it sets up a more robust approach to sentiment analysis of political texts in general, which allows scholars to study political sentiment from a comparative perspective using standardized tools and techniques.

Targeted opinion word extraction (TOWE) is a sub-task of aspect based sentiment analysis (ABSA) which aims to find the opinion words for a given aspect-term in a sentence. Despite their success for TOWE, the current deep learning models fail to exploit the syntactic information of the sentences that have been proved to be useful for TOWE in the prior research. In this work, we propose to incorporate the syntactic structures of the sentences into the deep learning models for TOWE, leveraging the syntax-based opinion possibility scores and the syntactic connections between the words. We also introduce a novel regularization technique to improve the performance of the deep learning models based on the representation distinctions between the words in TOWE. The proposed model is extensively analyzed and achieves the state-of-the-art performance on four benchmark datasets.

To achieve the long-term goal of machines being able to engage humans in conversation, our models should captivate the interest of their speaking partners. Communication grounded in images, whereby a dialogue is conducted based on a given photo, is a setup naturally appealing to humans (Hu et al., 2014). In this work we study large-scale architectures and datasets for this goal. We test a set of neural architectures using state-of-the-art image and text representations, considering various ways to fuse the components. To test such models, we collect a dataset of grounded human-human conversations, where speakers are asked to play roles given a provided emotional mood or style, as the use of such traits is also a key factor in engagingness (Guo et al., 2019). Our dataset, Image-Chat, consists of 202k dialogues over 202k images using 215 possible style traits. Automatic metrics and human evaluations of engagingness show the efficacy of our approach; in particular, we obtain state-of-the-art performance on the existing IGC task, and our best performing model is almost on par with humans on the Image-Chat test set (preferred 47.7% of the time).

Dialogue Act (DA) classification is a challenging problem in dialogue interpretation, which aims to attach semantic labels to utterances and characterize the speaker's intention. Currently, many existing approaches formulate the DA classification problem ranging from multi-classification to structured prediction, which suffer from two limitations: a) these methods are either handcrafted feature-based or have limited memories. b) adversarial examples can't be correctly classified by traditional training methods. To address these issues, in this paper we first cast the problem into a question and answering problem and proposed an improved dynamic memory networks with hierarchical pyramidal utterance encoder. Moreover, we apply adversarial training to train our proposed model. We evaluate our model on two public datasets, i.e., Switchboard dialogue act corpus and the MapTask corpus. Extensive experiments show that our proposed model is not only robust, but also achieves better performance when compared with some state-of-the-art baselines.

We propose a new benchmark, ComperDial, which facilitates the training and evaluation of evaluation metrics for open-domain dialogue systems. ComperDial consists of human-scored responses for 10,395 dialogue turns in 1,485 conversations collected from 99 dialogue agents submitted to the Commonsense Persona-grounded Dialogue (CPD) challenge. As a result, for any dialogue, our benchmark includes multiple diverse responses with variety of characteristics to ensure more robust evaluation of learned dialogue metrics. In addition to single-turn response scores, ComperDial also contains dialogue-level human-annotated scores, enabling joint assessment of multi-turn model responses throughout a dialogue. Finally, building off ComperDial, we devise a new automatic evaluation metric to measure the general similarity of model-generated dialogues to human conversations. Our experimental results demonstrate that our novel metric, CPDScore is more correlated with human judgments than existing metrics. We release both ComperDial and CPDScore to the community to accelerate development of automatic evaluation metrics for open-domain dialogue systems.

Smooth and effective communication requires the ability to perform latent or explicit commonsense inference. Prior commonsense reasoning benchmarks (such as SocialIQA and CommonsenseQA) mainly focus on the discriminative task of choosing the right answer from a set of candidates, and do not involve interactive language generation as in dialogue. Moreover, existing dialogue datasets do not explicitly focus on exhibiting commonsense as a facet. In this paper, we present an empirical study of commonsense in dialogue response generation. We first auto-extract commonsensical dialogues from existing dialogue datasets by leveraging ConceptNet, a commonsense knowledge graph. Furthermore, building on social contexts/situations in SocialIQA, we collect a new dialogue dataset with 25K dialogues aimed at exhibiting social commonsense in an interactive setting. We evaluate response generation models trained using these datasets and find that models trained on both extracted and our collected data produce responses that consistently exhibit more commonsense than baselines. Finally we propose an approach for automatic evaluation of commonsense that relies on features derived from ConceptNet and pre-trained language and dialog models, and show reasonable correlation with human evaluation of responses' commonsense quality. We are releasing a subset of our collected data, Commonsense-Dialogues, containing about 11K dialogs.

In this paper, we address the task of utterance level emotion recognition in conversations using commonsense knowledge. We propose COSMIC, a new framework that incorporates different elements of commonsense such as mental states, events, and causal relations, and build upon them to learn interactions between interlocutors participating in a conversation. Current state-of-the-art methods often encounter difficulties in context propagation, emotion shift detection, and differentiating between related emotion classes. By learning distinct commonsense representations, COSMIC addresses these challenges and achieves new state-of-the-art results for emotion recognition on four different benchmark conversational datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/declare-lab/conv-emotion.

Sentiment analysis is a vital tool for uncovering insights from financial articles, news, and social media, shaping our understanding of market movements. Despite the impressive capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in financial natural language processing (NLP), they still struggle with accurately interpreting numerical values and grasping financial context, limiting their effectiveness in predicting financial sentiment. In this paper, we introduce a simple yet effective instruction tuning approach to address these issues. By transforming a small portion of supervised financial sentiment analysis data into instruction data and fine-tuning a general-purpose LLM with this method, we achieve remarkable advancements in financial sentiment analysis. In the experiment, our approach outperforms state-of-the-art supervised sentiment analysis models, as well as widely used LLMs like ChatGPT and LLaMAs, particularly in scenarios where numerical understanding and contextual comprehension are vital.

In this work, we present a database of multimodal communication features extracted from debate speeches in the 2019 North American Universities Debate Championships (NAUDC). Feature sets were extracted from the visual (facial expression, gaze, and head pose), audio (PRAAT), and textual (word sentiment and linguistic category) modalities of raw video recordings of competitive collegiate debaters (N=717 6-minute recordings from 140 unique debaters). Each speech has an associated competition debate score (range: 67-96) from expert judges as well as competitor demographic and per-round reflection surveys. We observe the fully multimodal model performs best in comparison to models trained on various compositions of modalities. We also find that the weights of some features (such as the expression of joy and the use of the word we) change in direction between the aforementioned models. We use these results to highlight the value of a multimodal dataset for studying competitive, collegiate debate.

Conversational recommender system is an emerging area that has garnered an increasing interest in the community, especially with the advancements in large language models (LLMs) that enable diverse reasoning over conversational input. Despite the progress, the field has many aspects left to explore. The currently available public datasets for conversational recommendation lack specific user preferences and explanations for recommendations, hindering high-quality recommendations. To address such challenges, we present a novel conversational recommendation dataset named PEARL, synthesized with persona- and knowledge-augmented LLM simulators. We obtain detailed persona and knowledge from real-world reviews and construct a large-scale dataset with over 57k dialogues. Our experimental results demonstrate that utterances in PEARL include more specific user preferences, show expertise in the target domain, and provide recommendations more relevant to the dialogue context than those in prior datasets.

Large datasets are essential for neural modeling of many NLP tasks. Current publicly available open-domain dialogue datasets offer a trade-off between quality (e.g., DailyDialog) and size (e.g., Opensubtitles). We narrow this gap by building a high-quality dataset of 14.8M utterances in English, and smaller datasets in German, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Hungarian. We extract and process dialogues from public-domain books made available by Project Gutenberg. We describe our dialogue extraction pipeline, analyze the effects of the various heuristics used, and present an error analysis of extracted dialogues. Finally, we conduct experiments showing that better response quality can be achieved in zero-shot and finetuning settings by training on our data than on the larger but much noisier Opensubtitles dataset. Our open-source pipeline (https://github.com/ricsinaruto/gutenberg-dialog) can be extended to further languages with little additional effort. Researchers can also build their versions of existing datasets by adjusting various trade-off parameters. We also built a web demo for interacting with our models: https://ricsinaruto.github.io/chatbot.html.

Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT have demonstrated superior performance on a variety of natural language processing (NLP) tasks including sentiment analysis, mathematical reasoning and summarization. Furthermore, since these models are instruction-tuned on human conversations to produce "helpful" responses, they can and often will produce explanations along with the response, which we call self-explanations. For example, when analyzing the sentiment of a movie review, the model may output not only the positivity of the sentiment, but also an explanation (e.g., by listing the sentiment-laden words such as "fantastic" and "memorable" in the review). How good are these automatically generated self-explanations? In this paper, we investigate this question on the task of sentiment analysis and for feature attribution explanation, one of the most commonly studied settings in the interpretability literature (for pre-ChatGPT models). Specifically, we study different ways to elicit the self-explanations, evaluate their faithfulness on a set of evaluation metrics, and compare them to traditional explanation methods such as occlusion or LIME saliency maps. Through an extensive set of experiments, we find that ChatGPT's self-explanations perform on par with traditional ones, but are quite different from them according to various agreement metrics, meanwhile being much cheaper to produce (as they are generated along with the prediction). In addition, we identified several interesting characteristics of them, which prompt us to rethink many current model interpretability practices in the era of ChatGPT(-like) LLMs.

Human communication is inherently multimodal and asynchronous. Analyzing human emotions and sentiment is an emerging field of artificial intelligence. We are witnessing an increasing amount of multimodal content in local languages on social media about products and other topics. However, there are not many multimodal resources available for under-resourced Dravidian languages. Our study aims to create a multimodal sentiment analysis dataset for the under-resourced Tamil and Malayalam languages. First, we downloaded product or movies review videos from YouTube for Tamil and Malayalam. Next, we created captions for the videos with the help of annotators. Then we labelled the videos for sentiment, and verified the inter-annotator agreement using Fleiss's Kappa. This is the first multimodal sentiment analysis dataset for Tamil and Malayalam by volunteer annotators.

This paper introduces a novel approach to Dialogue State Tracking (DST) that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate natural language descriptions of dialogue states, moving beyond traditional slot-value representations. Conventional DST methods struggle with open-domain dialogues and noisy inputs. Motivated by the generative capabilities of LLMs, our Natural Language DST (NL-DST) framework trains an LLM to directly synthesize human-readable state descriptions. We demonstrate through extensive experiments on MultiWOZ 2.1 and Taskmaster-1 datasets that NL-DST significantly outperforms rule-based and discriminative BERT-based DST baselines, as well as generative slot-filling GPT-2 DST models, in both Joint Goal Accuracy and Slot Accuracy. Ablation studies and human evaluations further validate the effectiveness of natural language state generation, highlighting its robustness to noise and enhanced interpretability. Our findings suggest that NL-DST offers a more flexible, accurate, and human-understandable approach to dialogue state tracking, paving the way for more robust and adaptable task-oriented dialogue systems.

Modern dialog managers face the challenge of having to fulfill human-level conversational skills as part of common user expectations, including but not limited to discourse with no clear objective. Along with these requirements, agents are expected to extrapolate intent from the user's dialogue even when subjected to non-canonical forms of speech. This depends on the agent's comprehension of paraphrased forms of such utterances. Especially in low-resource languages, the lack of data is a bottleneck that prevents advancements of the comprehension performance for these types of agents. In this regard, here we demonstrate the necessity of extracting the intent argument of non-canonical directives in a natural language format, which may yield more accurate parsing, and suggest guidelines for building a parallel corpus for this purpose. Following the guidelines, we construct a Korean corpus of 50K instances of question/command-intent pairs, including the labels for classification of the utterance type. We also propose a method for mitigating class imbalance, demonstrating the potential applications of the corpus generation method and its multilingual extensibility.

We aim to produce a smaller language model that is aligned to user intent. Previous research has shown that applying distilled supervised fine-tuning (dSFT) on larger models significantly improves task accuracy; however, these models are unaligned, i.e. they do not respond well to natural prompts. To distill this property, we experiment with the use of preference data from AI Feedback (AIF). Starting from a dataset of outputs ranked by a teacher model, we apply distilled direct preference optimization (dDPO) to learn a chat model with significantly improved intent alignment. The approach requires only a few hours of training without any additional sampling during fine-tuning. The final result, Zephyr-7B, sets the state-of-the-art on chat benchmarks for 7B parameter models, and requires no human annotation. In particular, results on MT-Bench show that Zephyr-7B surpasses Llama2-Chat-70B, the best open-access RLHF-based model. Code, models, data, and tutorials for the system are available at https://github.com/huggingface/alignment-handbook.

Proposal of large-scale datasets has facilitated research on deep neural models for news summarization. Deep learning can also be potentially useful for spoken dialogue summarization, which can benefit a range of real-life scenarios including customer service management and medication tracking. To this end, we propose DialogSum, a large-scale labeled dialogue summarization dataset. We conduct empirical analysis on DialogSum using state-of-the-art neural summarizers. Experimental results show unique challenges in dialogue summarization, such as spoken terms, special discourse structures, coreferences and ellipsis, pragmatics and social common sense, which require specific representation learning technologies to better deal with.

Although human evaluation remains the gold standard for open-domain dialogue evaluation, the growing popularity of automated evaluation using Large Language Models (LLMs) has also extended to dialogue. However, most frameworks leverage benchmarks that assess older chatbots on aspects such as fluency and relevance, which are not reflective of the challenges associated with contemporary models. In fact, a qualitative analysis on Soda, a GPT-3.5 generated dialogue dataset, suggests that current chatbots may exhibit several recurring issues related to coherence and commonsense knowledge, but generally produce highly fluent and relevant responses. Noting the aforementioned limitations, this paper introduces Soda-Eval, an annotated dataset based on Soda that covers over 120K turn-level assessments across 10K dialogues, where the annotations were generated by GPT-4. Using Soda-Eval as a benchmark, we then study the performance of several open-access instruction-tuned LLMs, finding that dialogue evaluation remains challenging. Fine-tuning these models improves performance over few-shot inferences, both in terms of correlation and explanation.

Sentiment analysis is a widely researched area within Natural Language Processing (NLP), attracting significant interest due to the advent of automated solutions. Despite this, the task remains challenging because of the inherent complexity of languages and the subjective nature of sentiments. It is even more challenging for less-studied and less-resourced languages such as Lithuanian. Our review of existing Lithuanian NLP research reveals that traditional machine learning methods and classification algorithms have limited effectiveness for the task. In this work, we address sentiment analysis of Lithuanian five-star-based online reviews from multiple domains that we collect and clean. We apply transformer models to this task for the first time, exploring the capabilities of pre-trained multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs), specifically focusing on fine-tuning BERT and T5 models. Given the inherent difficulty of the task, the fine-tuned models perform quite well, especially when the sentiments themselves are less ambiguous: 80.74% and 89.61% testing recognition accuracy of the most popular one- and five-star reviews respectively. They significantly outperform current commercial state-of-the-art general-purpose LLM GPT-4. We openly share our fine-tuned LLMs online.

We address the problem of recognizing emotion cause in conversations, define two novel sub-tasks of this problem, and provide a corresponding dialogue-level dataset, along with strong Transformer-based baselines. The dataset is available at https://github.com/declare-lab/RECCON. Introduction: Recognizing the cause behind emotions in text is a fundamental yet under-explored area of research in NLP. Advances in this area hold the potential to improve interpretability and performance in affect-based models. Identifying emotion causes at the utterance level in conversations is particularly challenging due to the intermingling dynamics among the interlocutors. Method: We introduce the task of Recognizing Emotion Cause in CONversations with an accompanying dataset named RECCON, containing over 1,000 dialogues and 10,000 utterance cause-effect pairs. Furthermore, we define different cause types based on the source of the causes, and establish strong Transformer-based baselines to address two different sub-tasks on this dataset: causal span extraction and causal emotion entailment. Result: Our Transformer-based baselines, which leverage contextual pre-trained embeddings, such as RoBERTa, outperform the state-of-the-art emotion cause extraction approaches Conclusion: We introduce a new task highly relevant for (explainable) emotion-aware artificial intelligence: recognizing emotion cause in conversations, provide a new highly challenging publicly available dialogue-level dataset for this task, and give strong baseline results on this dataset.

Despite showing increasingly human-like conversational abilities, state-of-the-art dialogue models often suffer from factual incorrectness and hallucination of knowledge (Roller et al., 2020). In this work we explore the use of neural-retrieval-in-the-loop architectures - recently shown to be effective in open-domain QA (Lewis et al., 2020b; Izacard and Grave, 2020) - for knowledge-grounded dialogue, a task that is arguably more challenging as it requires querying based on complex multi-turn dialogue context and generating conversationally coherent responses. We study various types of architectures with multiple components - retrievers, rankers, and encoder-decoders - with the goal of maximizing knowledgeability while retaining conversational ability. We demonstrate that our best models obtain state-of-the-art performance on two knowledge-grounded conversational tasks. The models exhibit open-domain conversational capabilities, generalize effectively to scenarios not within the training data, and, as verified by human evaluations, substantially reduce the well-known problem of knowledge hallucination in state-of-the-art chatbots.

Debate is the process of exchanging viewpoints or convincing others on a particular issue. Recent research has provided empirical evidence that the persuasiveness of an argument is determined not only by language usage but also by communicator characteristics. Researchers have paid much attention to aspects of languages, such as linguistic features and discourse structures, but combining argument persuasiveness and impact with the social personae of the audience has not been explored due to the difficulty and complexity. We have observed the impressive simulation and personification capability of ChatGPT, indicating a giant pre-trained language model may function as an individual to provide personae and exert unique influences based on diverse background knowledge. Therefore, we propose a persona knowledge-aligned framework for argument quality assessment tasks from the audience side. This is the first work that leverages the emergence of ChatGPT and injects such audience personae knowledge into smaller language models via prompt tuning. The performance of our pipeline demonstrates significant and consistent improvement compared to competitive architectures.

Recent research on dialogue state tracking (DST) focuses on methods that allow few- and zero-shot transfer to new domains or schemas. However, performance gains heavily depend on aggressive data augmentation and fine-tuning of ever larger language model based architectures. In contrast, general purpose language models, trained on large amounts of diverse data, hold the promise of solving any kind of task without task-specific training. We present preliminary experimental results on the ChatGPT research preview, showing that ChatGPT achieves state-of-the-art performance in zero-shot DST. Despite our findings, we argue that properties inherent to general purpose models limit their ability to replace specialized systems. We further theorize that the in-context learning capabilities of such models will likely become powerful tools to support the development of dedicated and dynamic dialogue state trackers.

Despite growing interest in applications based on natural customer support conversations, there exist remarkably few publicly available datasets that reflect the expected characteristics of conversations in these settings. Existing task-oriented dialogue datasets, which were collected to benchmark dialogue systems mainly in written human-to-bot settings, are not representative of real customer support conversations and do not provide realistic benchmarks for systems that are applied to natural data. To address this gap, we introduce NatCS, a multi-domain collection of spoken customer service conversations. We describe our process for collecting synthetic conversations between customers and agents based on natural language phenomena observed in real conversations. Compared to previous dialogue datasets, the conversations collected with our approach are more representative of real human-to-human conversations along multiple metrics. Finally, we demonstrate potential uses of NatCS, including dialogue act classification and intent induction from conversations as potential applications, showing that dialogue act annotations in NatCS provide more effective training data for modeling real conversations compared to existing synthetic written datasets. We publicly release NatCS to facilitate research in natural dialog systems

This paper presents a compact model that achieves strong sentiment analysis capabilities through targeted distillation from advanced large language models (LLMs). Our methodology decouples the distillation target into two key components: sentiment-related knowledge and task alignment. To transfer these components, we propose a two-stage distillation framework. The first stage, knowledge-driven distillation (KnowDist), transfers sentiment-related knowledge to enhance fundamental sentiment analysis capabilities. The second stage, in-context learning distillation (ICLDist), transfers task-specific prompt-following abilities to optimize task alignment. For evaluation, we introduce SentiBench, a comprehensive sentiment analysis benchmark comprising 3 task categories across 12 datasets. Experiments on this benchmark demonstrate that our model effectively balances model size and performance, showing strong competitiveness compared to existing small-scale LLMs.

The long-standing one-to-many issue of the open-domain dialogues poses significant challenges for automatic evaluation methods, i.e., there may be multiple suitable responses which differ in semantics for a given conversational context. To tackle this challenge, we propose a novel learning-based automatic evaluation metric (CMN), which can robustly evaluate open-domain dialogues by augmenting Conditional Variational Autoencoders (CVAEs) with a Next Sentence Prediction (NSP) objective and employing Mutual Information (MI) to model the semantic similarity of text in the latent space. Experimental results on two open-domain dialogue datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method compared with a wide range of baselines, especially in handling responses which are distant to the golden reference responses in semantics.

While rich, open-domain textual data are generally available and may include interesting phenomena (humor, sarcasm, empathy, etc.) most are designed for language processing tasks, and are usually in a non-conversational format. In this work, we take a step towards automatically generating conversational data using Generative Conversational Networks, aiming to benefit from the breadth of available language and knowledge data, and train open domain social conversational agents. We evaluate our approach on conversations with and without knowledge on the Topical Chat dataset using automatic metrics and human evaluators. Our results show that for conversations without knowledge grounding, GCN can generalize from the seed data, producing novel conversations that are less relevant but more engaging and for knowledge-grounded conversations, it can produce more knowledge-focused, fluent, and engaging conversations. Specifically, we show that for open-domain conversations with 10\% of seed data, our approach performs close to the baseline that uses 100% of the data, while for knowledge-grounded conversations, it achieves the same using only 1% of the data, on human ratings of engagingness, fluency, and relevance.

Proactive dialogue system is able to lead the conversation to a goal topic and has advantaged potential in bargain, persuasion and negotiation. Current corpus-based learning manner limits its practical application in real-world scenarios. To this end, we contribute to advance the study of the proactive dialogue policy to a more natural and challenging setting, i.e., interacting dynamically with users. Further, we call attention to the non-cooperative user behavior -- the user talks about off-path topics when he/she is not satisfied with the previous topics introduced by the agent. We argue that the targets of reaching the goal topic quickly and maintaining a high user satisfaction are not always converge, because the topics close to the goal and the topics user preferred may not be the same. Towards this issue, we propose a new solution named I-Pro that can learn Proactive policy in the Interactive setting. Specifically, we learn the trade-off via a learned goal weight, which consists of four factors (dialogue turn, goal completion difficulty, user satisfaction estimation, and cooperative degree). The experimental results demonstrate I-Pro significantly outperforms baselines in terms of effectiveness and interpretability.

The rapid expansion of the digital world has propelled sentiment analysis into a critical tool across diverse sectors such as marketing, politics, customer service, and healthcare. While there have been significant advancements in sentiment analysis for widely spoken languages, low-resource languages, such as Bangla, remain largely under-researched due to resource constraints. Furthermore, the recent unprecedented performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) in various applications highlights the need to evaluate them in the context of low-resource languages. In this study, we present a sizeable manually annotated dataset encompassing 33,605 Bangla news tweets and Facebook comments. We also investigate zero- and few-shot in-context learning with several language models, including Flan-T5, GPT-4, and Bloomz, offering a comparative analysis against fine-tuned models. Our findings suggest that monolingual transformer-based models consistently outperform other models, even in zero and few-shot scenarios. To foster continued exploration, we intend to make this dataset and our research tools publicly available to the broader research community. In the spirit of further research, we plan to make this dataset and our experimental resources publicly accessible to the wider research community.

Spoken Dialogue Models (SDMs) have recently attracted significant attention for their ability to generate voice responses directly to users' spoken queries. Despite their increasing popularity, there exists a gap in research focused on comprehensively understanding their practical effectiveness in comprehending and emulating human conversations. This is especially true compared to text-based Large Language Models (LLMs), which benefit from extensive benchmarking. Human voice interactions are inherently more complex than text due to characteristics unique to spoken dialogue. Ambiguity poses one challenge, stemming from semantic factors like polysemy, as well as phonological aspects such as heterograph, heteronyms, and stress patterns. Additionally, context-dependency, like omission, coreference, and multi-turn interaction, adds further complexity to human conversational dynamics. To illuminate the current state of SDM development and to address these challenges, we present a benchmark dataset in this paper, which comprises 1,079 instances in English and Chinese. Accompanied by an LLM-based evaluation method that closely aligns with human judgment, this dataset facilitates a comprehensive exploration of the performance of SDMs in tackling these practical challenges.

Human language expression is based on the subjective construal of the situation instead of the objective truth conditions, which means that speakers' personalities and emotions after cognitive processing have an important influence on conversation. However, most existing datasets for conversational AI ignore human personalities and emotions, or only consider part of them. It's difficult for dialogue systems to understand speakers' personalities and emotions although large-scale pre-training language models have been widely used. In order to consider both personalities and emotions in the process of conversation generation, we propose CPED, a large-scale Chinese personalized and emotional dialogue dataset, which consists of multi-source knowledge related to empathy and personal characteristic. These knowledge covers gender, Big Five personality traits, 13 emotions, 19 dialogue acts and 10 scenes. CPED contains more than 12K dialogues of 392 speakers from 40 TV shows. We release the textual dataset with audio features and video features according to the copyright claims, privacy issues, terms of service of video platforms. We provide detailed description of the CPED construction process and introduce three tasks for conversational AI, including personality recognition, emotion recognition in conversations as well as personalized and emotional conversation generation. Finally, we provide baseline systems for these tasks and consider the function of speakers' personalities and emotions on conversation. Our motivation is to propose a dataset to be widely adopted by the NLP community as a new open benchmark for conversational AI research. The full dataset is available at https://github.com/scutcyr/CPED.

Existing open-domain dialog models are generally trained to minimize the perplexity of target human responses. However, some human replies are more engaging than others, spawning more followup interactions. Current conversational models are increasingly capable of producing turns that are context-relevant, but in order to produce compelling agents, these models need to be able to predict and optimize for turns that are genuinely engaging. We leverage social media feedback data (number of replies and upvotes) to build a large-scale training dataset for feedback prediction. To alleviate possible distortion between the feedback and engagingness, we convert the ranking problem to a comparison of response pairs which involve few confounding factors. We trained DialogRPT, a set of GPT-2 based models on 133M pairs of human feedback data and the resulting ranker outperformed several baselines. Particularly, our ranker outperforms the conventional dialog perplexity baseline with a large margin on predicting Reddit feedback. We finally combine the feedback prediction models and a human-like scoring model to rank the machine-generated dialog responses. Crowd-sourced human evaluation shows that our ranking method correlates better with real human preferences than baseline models.

In this paper we present a technique of NLP to tackle the problem of inference relation (NLI) between pairs of sentences in a target language of choice without a language-specific training dataset. We exploit a generic translation dataset, manually translated, along with two instances of the same pre-trained model - the first to generate sentence embeddings for the source language, and the second fine-tuned over the target language to mimic the first. This technique is known as Knowledge Distillation. The model has been evaluated over machine translated Stanford NLI test dataset, machine translated Multi-Genre NLI test dataset, and manually translated RTE3-ITA test dataset. We also test the proposed architecture over different tasks to empirically demonstrate the generality of the NLI task. The model has been evaluated over the native Italian ABSITA dataset, on the tasks of Sentiment Analysis, Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis, and Topic Recognition. We emphasise the generality and exploitability of the Knowledge Distillation technique that outperforms other methodologies based on machine translation, even though the former was not directly trained on the data it was tested over.

Natural language understanding (NLU) is a task that enables machines to understand human language. Some tasks, such as stance detection and sentiment analysis, are closely related to individual subjective perspectives, thus termed individual-level NLU. Previously, these tasks are often simplified to text-level NLU tasks, ignoring individual factors. This not only makes inference difficult and unexplainable but often results in a large number of label errors when creating datasets. To address the above limitations, we propose a new NLU annotation guideline based on individual-level factors. Specifically, we incorporate other posts by the same individual and then annotate individual subjective perspectives after considering all individual posts. We use this guideline to expand and re-annotate the stance detection and topic-based sentiment analysis datasets. We find that error rates in the samples were as high as 31.7\% and 23.3\%. We further use large language models to conduct experiments on the re-annotation datasets and find that the large language models perform well on both datasets after adding individual factors. Both GPT-4o and Llama3-70B can achieve an accuracy greater than 87\% on the re-annotation datasets. We also verify the effectiveness of individual factors through ablation studies. We call on future researchers to add individual factors when creating such datasets. Our re-annotation dataset can be found at https://github.com/24yearsoldstudent/Individual-NLU

Conversational recommender systems (CRS) aim to recommend relevant items to users by eliciting user preference through natural language conversation. Prior work often utilizes external knowledge graphs for items' semantic information, a language model for dialogue generation, and a recommendation module for ranking relevant items. This combination of multiple components suffers from a cumbersome training process, and leads to semantic misalignment issues between dialogue generation and item recommendation. In this paper, we represent items in natural language and formulate CRS as a natural language processing task. Accordingly, we leverage the power of pre-trained language models to encode items, understand user intent via conversation, perform item recommendation through semantic matching, and generate dialogues. As a unified model, our PECRS (Parameter-Efficient CRS), can be optimized in a single stage, without relying on non-textual metadata such as a knowledge graph. Experiments on two benchmark CRS datasets, ReDial and INSPIRED, demonstrate the effectiveness of PECRS on recommendation and conversation. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Ravoxsg/efficient_unified_crs.

Emotional support is a crucial ability for many conversation scenarios, including social interactions, mental health support, and customer service chats. Following reasonable procedures and using various support skills can help to effectively provide support. However, due to the lack of a well-designed task and corpora of effective emotional support conversations, research on building emotional support into dialog systems remains untouched. In this paper, we define the Emotional Support Conversation (ESC) task and propose an ESC Framework, which is grounded on the Helping Skills Theory. We construct an Emotion Support Conversation dataset (ESConv) with rich annotation (especially support strategy) in a help-seeker and supporter mode. To ensure a corpus of high-quality conversations that provide examples of effective emotional support, we take extensive effort to design training tutorials for supporters and several mechanisms for quality control during data collection. Finally, we evaluate state-of-the-art dialog models with respect to the ability to provide emotional support. Our results show the importance of support strategies in providing effective emotional support and the utility of ESConv in training more emotional support systems.

We present GLM-Dialog, a large-scale language model (LLM) with 10B parameters capable of knowledge-grounded conversation in Chinese using a search engine to access the Internet knowledge. GLM-Dialog offers a series of applicable techniques for exploiting various external knowledge including both helpful and noisy knowledge, enabling the creation of robust knowledge-grounded dialogue LLMs with limited proper datasets. To evaluate the GLM-Dialog more fairly, we also propose a novel evaluation method to allow humans to converse with multiple deployed bots simultaneously and compare their performance implicitly instead of explicitly rating using multidimensional metrics.Comprehensive evaluations from automatic to human perspective demonstrate the advantages of GLM-Dialog comparing with existing open source Chinese dialogue models. We release both the model checkpoint and source code, and also deploy it as a WeChat application to interact with users. We offer our evaluation platform online in an effort to prompt the development of open source models and reliable dialogue evaluation systems. The additional easy-to-use toolkit that consists of short text entity linking, query generation, and helpful knowledge classification is also released to enable diverse applications. All the source code is available on Github.

Recent model-based reference-free metrics for open-domain dialogue evaluation exhibit promising correlations with human judgment. However, they either perform turn-level evaluation or look at a single dialogue quality dimension. One would expect a good evaluation metric to assess multiple quality dimensions at the dialogue level. To this end, we are motivated to propose a multi-dimensional dialogue-level metric, which consists of three sub-metrics with each targeting a specific dimension. The sub-metrics are trained with novel self-supervised objectives and exhibit strong correlations with human judgment for their respective dimensions. Moreover, we explore two approaches to combine the sub-metrics: metric ensemble and multitask learning. Both approaches yield a holistic metric that significantly outperforms individual sub-metrics. Compared to the existing state-of-the-art metric, the combined metrics achieve around 16% relative improvement on average across three high-quality dialogue-level evaluation benchmarks.

We present the Touch\'e23-ValueEval Dataset for Identifying Human Values behind Arguments. To investigate approaches for the automated detection of human values behind arguments, we collected 9324 arguments from 6 diverse sources, covering religious texts, political discussions, free-text arguments, newspaper editorials, and online democracy platforms. Each argument was annotated by 3 crowdworkers for 54 values. The Touch\'e23-ValueEval dataset extends the Webis-ArgValues-22. In comparison to the previous dataset, the effectiveness of a 1-Baseline decreases, but that of an out-of-the-box BERT model increases. Therefore, though the classification difficulty increased as per the label distribution, the larger dataset allows for training better models.

State-of-the-art conversational agents have advanced significantly in conjunction with the use of large transformer-based language models. However, even with these advancements, conversational agents still lack the ability to produce responses that are informative and coherent with the local context. In this work, we propose a dialog framework that incorporates both local knowledge as well as users' past dialogues to generate high quality conversations. We introduce an approach to build a dataset based on Reddit conversations, where outbound URL links are widely available in the conversations and the hyperlinked documents can be naturally included as local external knowledge. Using our framework and dataset, we demonstrate that incorporating local knowledge can largely improve informativeness, coherency and realisticness measures using human evaluations. In particular, our approach consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art conversational model on the Reddit dataset across all three measures. We also find that scaling the size of our models from 117M to 8.3B parameters yields consistent improvement of validation perplexity as well as human evaluated metrics. Our model with 8.3B parameters can generate human-like responses as rated by various human evaluations in a single-turn dialog setting.

The paper describes the RuSentNE-2023 evaluation devoted to targeted sentiment analysis in Russian news texts. The task is to predict sentiment towards a named entity in a single sentence. The dataset for RuSentNE-2023 evaluation is based on the Russian news corpus RuSentNE having rich sentiment-related annotation. The corpus is annotated with named entities and sentiments towards these entities, along with related effects and emotional states. The evaluation was organized using the CodaLab competition framework. The main evaluation measure was macro-averaged measure of positive and negative classes. The best results achieved were of 66% Macro F-measure (Positive+Negative classes). We also tested ChatGPT on the test set from our evaluation and found that the zero-shot answers provided by ChatGPT reached 60% of the F-measure, which corresponds to 4th place in the evaluation. ChatGPT also provided detailed explanations of its conclusion. This can be considered as quite high for zero-shot application.

This paper presents two self-contained tutorials on stance detection in Twitter data using BERT fine-tuning and prompting large language models (LLMs). The first tutorial explains BERT architecture and tokenization, guiding users through training, tuning, and evaluating standard and domain-specific BERT models with HuggingFace transformers. The second focuses on constructing prompts and few-shot examples to elicit stances from ChatGPT and open-source FLAN-T5 without fine-tuning. Various prompting strategies are implemented and evaluated using confusion matrices and macro F1 scores. The tutorials provide code, visualizations, and insights revealing the strengths of few-shot ChatGPT and FLAN-T5 which outperform fine-tuned BERTs. By covering both model fine-tuning and prompting-based techniques in an accessible, hands-on manner, these tutorials enable learners to gain applied experience with cutting-edge methods for stance detection.

The development of emotion recognition in dialogue (ERC) has been consistently hindered by the complexity of pipeline designs, leading to ERC models that often overfit to specific datasets and dialogue patterns. In this study, we propose a novel approach, namely InstructERC, to reformulates the ERC task from a discriminative framework to a generative framework based on Large Language Models (LLMs) . InstructERC has two significant contributions: Firstly, InstructERC introduces a simple yet effective retrieval template module, which helps the model explicitly integrate multi-granularity dialogue supervision information by concatenating the historical dialog content, label statement, and emotional domain demonstrations with high semantic similarity. Furthermore, we introduce two additional emotion alignment tasks, namely speaker identification and emotion prediction tasks, to implicitly model the dialogue role relationships and future emotional tendencies in conversations. Our LLM-based plug-and-play plugin framework significantly outperforms all previous models and achieves comprehensive SOTA on three commonly used ERC datasets. Extensive analysis of parameter-efficient and data-scaling experiments provide empirical guidance for applying InstructERC in practical scenarios. Our code will be released after blind review.

Automatic open-domain dialogue evaluation has attracted increasing attention. Trainable evaluation metrics, typically trained with true positive and randomly selected negative responses, tend to assign higher scores to responses that share greater content similarity with a given context. However, adversarial negative responses, despite possessing high content similarity with the contexts, are semantically different. Consequently, existing evaluation metrics are not robust enough to evaluate such responses, resulting in low correlations with human judgments. While recent studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of Large Language Models (LLMs) for open-domain dialogue evaluation, they still face challenges in effectively handling adversarial negative examples. In this paper, we propose an effective framework for open-domain dialogue evaluation, which combines domain-specific language models (SLMs) enhanced with Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) knowledge with LLMs. The SLMs can explicitly incorporate AMR graph information of the dialogue through a gating mechanism for enhanced dialogue semantic representation learning. Both the evaluation result from the SLMs and the AMR graph information are incorporated into the LLM's prompt for enhanced evaluation performance. Experimental results on open-domain dialogue evaluation tasks demonstrate the superiority of our method compared to a wide range of state-of-the-art baselines, especially in discriminating adversarial negative responses. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/Bernard-Yang/SIMAMR.

Oral histories are vital records of lived experience, particularly within communities affected by systemic injustice and historical erasure. Effective and efficient analysis of their oral history archives can promote access and understanding of the oral histories. However, Large-scale analysis of these archives remains limited due to their unstructured format, emotional complexity, and high annotation costs. This paper presents a scalable framework to automate semantic and sentiment annotation for Japanese American Incarceration Oral History. Using LLMs, we construct a high-quality dataset, evaluate multiple models, and test prompt engineering strategies in historically sensitive contexts. Our multiphase approach combines expert annotation, prompt design, and LLM evaluation with ChatGPT, Llama, and Qwen. We labeled 558 sentences from 15 narrators for sentiment and semantic classification, then evaluated zero-shot, few-shot, and RAG strategies. For semantic classification, ChatGPT achieved the highest F1 score (88.71%), followed by Llama (84.99%) and Qwen (83.72%). For sentiment analysis, Llama slightly outperformed Qwen (82.66%) and ChatGPT (82.29%), with all models showing comparable results. The best prompt configurations were used to annotate 92,191 sentences from 1,002 interviews in the JAIOH collection. Our findings show that LLMs can effectively perform semantic and sentiment annotation across large oral history collections when guided by well-designed prompts. This study provides a reusable annotation pipeline and practical guidance for applying LLMs in culturally sensitive archival analysis. By bridging archival ethics with scalable NLP techniques, this work lays the groundwork for responsible use of artificial intelligence in digital humanities and preservation of collective memory. GitHub: https://github.com/kc6699c/LLM4OralHistoryAnalysis.

We present the first sizeable corpus of Thai speech emotion recognition, THAI-SER, containing 41 hours and 36 minutes (27,854 utterances) from 100 recordings made in different recording environments: Zoom and two studio setups. The recordings contain both scripted and improvised sessions, acted by 200 professional actors (112 females and 88 males, aged 18 to 55) and were directed by professional directors. There are five primary emotions: neutral, angry, happy, sad, and frustrated, assigned to the actors when recording utterances. The utterances are annotated with an emotional category using crowdsourcing. To control the annotation process's quality, we also design an extensive filtering and quality control scheme to ensure that the majority agreement score remains above 0.71. We evaluate our annotated corpus using two metrics: inter-annotator reliability and human recognition accuracy. Inter-annotator reliability score was calculated using Krippendorff's alpha, where our corpus, after filtering, achieved an alpha score of 0.692, higher than a recommendation of 0.667. For human recognition accuracy, our corpus scored up to 0.772 post-filtering. We also provide the results of the model trained on the corpus evaluated on both in-corpus and cross-corpus setups. The corpus is publicly available under a Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0, as well as our codes for the experiments.

Interacting with human via high-quality multi-turn dialogues is a key feature of large language models (LLMs). However, human-based evaluation of such capability involves intensive manual labor. This report provides a preliminary evaluation of existing large language models for human-style multi-turn chatting, through an LLM-based approach. We start from real-world human dialogues and keep the very first utterances as the ChatSEED. Then we prompt LLMs to generate a full multi-turn dialogue (tens of utterances) based on the ChatSEED, utterance by utterance. Finally, we adopt state-of-the-art LLMs (GPT-4, \etc) as the judge to evaluate the generated dialogues. With different evaluation protocols, we come to substantially identical conclusions. We find that GPT-4 can generate human-style multi-turn dialogues with impressive quality, significantly outperforms its counterparts. It's difficult for a discriminator to distinguish between GPT-4 generated dialogues and human dialogues. In contrast, other LLMs struggle to generate multi-turn dialogues of satisfactory quality due to poor instruction-following capability, tendency to generate lengthy utterances, or limited general capability. All data and codes will be provided in https://github.com/open-compass/BotChat/ and we hope they can serve as a valuable resource for evaluating multi-turn chatting capabilities of LLMs.

Most datasets for sentiment analysis lack context in which an opinion was expressed, often crucial for emotion understanding, and are mainly limited by a few emotion categories. Foundation large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 suffer from over-predicting emotions and are too resource-intensive. We design an LLM-based data synthesis pipeline and leverage a large model, Mistral-7b, for the generation of training examples for more accessible, lightweight BERT-type encoder models. We focus on enlarging the semantic diversity of examples and propose grounding the generation into a corpus of narratives to produce non-repetitive story-character-centered utterances with unique contexts over 28 emotion classes. By running 700K inferences in 450 GPU hours, we contribute with the dataset of 100K contextual and also 300K context-less examples to cover both scenarios. We use it for fine-tuning pre-trained encoders, which results in several Emo Pillars models. We show that Emo Pillars models are highly adaptive to new domains when tuned to specific tasks such as GoEmotions, ISEAR, IEMOCAP, and EmoContext, reaching the SOTA performance on the first three. We also validate our dataset, conducting statistical analysis and human evaluation, and confirm the success of our measures in utterance diversification (although less for the neutral class) and context personalization, while pointing out the need for improved handling of out-of-taxonomy labels within the pipeline.

Dialogue-based language models mark a huge milestone in the field of artificial intelligence, by their impressive ability to interact with users, as well as a series of challenging tasks prompted by customized instructions. However, the prevalent large-scale dialogue-based language models like ChatGPT still have room for improvement, such as unstable responses to questions and the inability to think cooperatively like humans. Considering the ability of dialogue-based language models in conversation and their inherent randomness in thinking, we propose ChatLLM network that allows multiple dialogue-based language models to interact, provide feedback, and think together. We design the network of ChatLLMs based on ChatGPT. Specifically, individual instances of ChatGPT may possess distinct perspectives towards the same problem, and by consolidating these diverse viewpoints via a separate ChatGPT, the ChatLLM network system can conduct decision-making more objectively and comprehensively. In addition, a language-based feedback mechanism comparable to backpropagation is devised to update the ChatGPTs within the network. Experiments on two datasets demonstrate that our network attains significant improvements in problem-solving, leading to observable progress amongst each member.

Recent advances in large language models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in task-oriented applications, yet building emotionally intelligent chatbots that can engage in natural, strategic conversations remains a challenge. We present a novel approach called SAGE that uses latent variables to control long-horizon behavior in dialogue generation. At the core of our method is the State-Action Chain (SAC), which augments standard language model fine-tuning by introducing latent variables that encapsulate emotional states and conversational strategies between dialogue turns. During inference, these variables are generated before each response, enabling coarse-grained control over dialogue progression while maintaining natural interaction patterns. We also introduce a self-improvement pipeline that leverages dialogue tree search, LLM-based reward modeling, and targeted fine-tuning to optimize conversational trajectories. Our experimental results show that models trained with this approach demonstrate improved performance in emotional intelligence metrics while maintaining strong capabilities on LLM benchmarks. The discrete nature of our latent variables facilitates search-based strategies and provides a foundation for future applications of reinforcement learning to dialogue systems, where learning can occur at the state level rather than the token level.

Building dialogue systems requires a large corpus of annotated dialogues. Such datasets are usually created via crowdsourcing, which is expensive and time-consuming. In this paper, we propose Dialogic, a novel dialogue simulation method based on large language model in-context learning to automate dataset creation. Seeded with a few annotated dialogues, Dialogic automatically selects in-context examples for demonstration and prompts GPT-3 to generate new dialogues and annotations in a controllable way. Our method can rapidly expand a small set of dialogue data with minimum or zero human involvement and parameter update and is thus much more cost-efficient and time-saving than crowdsourcing. Experimental results on the MultiWOZ dataset demonstrate that training a model on the simulated dialogues leads to even better performance than using the same amount of human-generated dialogues under the challenging low-resource settings, with as few as 85 dialogues as a seed. When enough data is available, our method can still serve as an effective data augmentation method. Human evaluation results also show that our simulated dialogues have near-human fluency and annotation accuracy. The code and data are available at \url{https://github.com/Leezekun/dialogic}.

In this paper, we present our submission to the MM-ArgFallacy2025 shared task, which aims to advance research in multimodal argument mining, focusing on logical fallacies in political debates. Our approach uses pretrained Transformer-based models and proposes several ways to leverage context. In the fallacy classification subtask, our models achieved macro F1-scores of 0.4444 (text), 0.3559 (audio), and 0.4403 (multimodal). Our multimodal model showed performance comparable to the text-only model, suggesting potential for improvements.

Morality is a fundamental aspect of human behavior and ethics, influencing how we interact with each other and the world around us. When faced with a moral dilemma, a person's ability to make clear moral judgments can be clouded. Due to many factors such as personal biases, emotions and situational factors people can find it difficult to decide their best course of action. The AmITheAsshole (AITA) subreddit is a forum on the social media platform Reddit that helps people get clarity and objectivity on their predicaments. In the forum people post anecdotes about moral dilemmas they are facing in their lives, seeking validation for their actions or advice on how to navigate the situation from the community. The morality of the actions in each post is classified based on the collective opinion of the community into mainly two labels, "Not The Asshole" (NTA) and "You Are The Asshole" (YTA). This project aims to generate comments with moral reasoning for stories with moral dilemmas using the AITA subreddit as a dataset. While past literature has explored the classification of posts into labels (Alhassan et al., 2022), the generation of comments remains a novel and challenging task. It involves understanding the complex social and ethical considerations in each situation. To address this challenge, we will leverage the vast amount of data on the forum with the goal of generating coherent comments that align with the norms and values of the AITA community. In this endeavor, we aim to evaluate state-of-the-art seq2seq text generation models for their ability to make moral judgments similarly to humans, ultimately producing concise comments providing clear moral stances and advice for the poster.

We present Sparrow, an information-seeking dialogue agent trained to be more helpful, correct, and harmless compared to prompted language model baselines. We use reinforcement learning from human feedback to train our models with two new additions to help human raters judge agent behaviour. First, to make our agent more helpful and harmless, we break down the requirements for good dialogue into natural language rules the agent should follow, and ask raters about each rule separately. We demonstrate that this breakdown enables us to collect more targeted human judgements of agent behaviour and allows for more efficient rule-conditional reward models. Second, our agent provides evidence from sources supporting factual claims when collecting preference judgements over model statements. For factual questions, evidence provided by Sparrow supports the sampled response 78% of the time. Sparrow is preferred more often than baselines while being more resilient to adversarial probing by humans, violating our rules only 8% of the time when probed. Finally, we conduct extensive analyses showing that though our model learns to follow our rules it can exhibit distributional biases.

Emotional support is a crucial skill for many real-world scenarios, including caring for the elderly, mental health support, and customer service chats. This paper presents a novel task of empathetic dialog generation with positive emotion elicitation to promote users' positive emotions, similar to that of emotional support between humans. In this task, the agent conducts empathetic responses along with the target of eliciting the user's positive emotions in the multi-turn dialog. To facilitate the study of this task, we collect a large-scale emotional dialog dataset with positive emotion elicitation, called PosEmoDial (about 820k dialogs, 3M utterances). In these dialogs, the agent tries to guide the user from any possible initial emotional state, e.g., sadness, to a positive emotional state. Then we present a positive-emotion-guided dialog generation model with a novel loss function design. This loss function encourages the dialog model to not only elicit positive emotions from users but also ensure smooth emotional transitions along with the whole dialog. Finally, we establish benchmark results on PosEmoDial, and we will release this dataset and related source code to facilitate future studies.

Evaluating the conversational abilities of large language models (LLMs) remains a challenging task. Current mainstream approaches primarily rely on the ``LLM-as-a-judge" paradigm, where an LLM is prompted to serve as an evaluator to assess dialogue quality. However, such methods often suffer from various biases, which undermine the reliability and consistency of the evaluation results. To mitigate these biases, recent methods employ multiple LLMs as judges and aggregate their judgments to select the optimal assessment. Although effective, this multi-judge approach incurs significant computational overhead during inference. In this paper, we propose an efficient multi-turn dialogue evaluator that captures the collective wisdom of multiple LLM judges by aggregating their preference knowledge into a single model. Our approach preserves the advantages of diverse multi-judge feedback while drastically reducing the evaluation cost, enabling fast and flexible dialogue quality assessment. Extensive experiments on seven single rating and pairwise comparison dialogue evaluation benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms existing baselines across diverse scenarios, showcasing its efficiency and robustness.

Target-guided response generation enables dialogue systems to smoothly transition a conversation from a dialogue context toward a target sentence. Such control is useful for designing dialogue systems that direct a conversation toward specific goals, such as creating non-obtrusive recommendations or introducing new topics in the conversation. In this paper, we introduce a new technique for target-guided response generation, which first finds a bridging path of commonsense knowledge concepts between the source and the target, and then uses the identified bridging path to generate transition responses. Additionally, we propose techniques to re-purpose existing dialogue datasets for target-guided generation. Experiments reveal that the proposed techniques outperform various baselines on this task. Finally, we observe that the existing automated metrics for this task correlate poorly with human judgement ratings. We propose a novel evaluation metric that we demonstrate is more reliable for target-guided response evaluation. Our work generally enables dialogue system designers to exercise more control over the conversations that their systems produce.

Sentiment analysis and opinion mining is an important task with obvious application areas in social media, e.g. when indicating hate speech and fake news. In our survey of previous work, we note that there is no large-scale social media data set with sentiment polarity annotations for Finnish. This publications aims to remedy this shortcoming by introducing a 27,000 sentence data set annotated independently with sentiment polarity by three native annotators. We had the same three annotators for the whole data set, which provides a unique opportunity for further studies of annotator behaviour over time. We analyse their inter-annotator agreement and provide two baselines to validate the usefulness of the data set.

Automatic evaluation is an integral aspect of dialogue system research. The traditional reference-based NLG metrics are generally found to be unsuitable for dialogue assessment. Consequently, recent studies have suggested various unique, reference-free neural metrics that better align with human evaluations. Notably among them, large language models (LLMs), particularly the instruction-tuned variants like ChatGPT, are shown to be promising substitutes for human judges. Yet, existing works on utilizing LLMs for automatic dialogue evaluation are limited in their scope in terms of the number of meta-evaluation datasets, mode of evaluation, coverage of LLMs, etc. Hence, it remains inconclusive how effective these LLMs are. To this end, we conduct a comprehensive study on the application of LLMs for automatic dialogue evaluation. Specifically, we analyze the multi-dimensional evaluation capability of 30 recently emerged LLMs at both turn and dialogue levels, using a comprehensive set of 12 meta-evaluation datasets. Additionally, we probe the robustness of the LLMs in handling various adversarial perturbations at both turn and dialogue levels. Finally, we explore how model-level and dimension-level ensembles impact the evaluation performance. All resources are available at https://github.com/e0397123/comp-analysis.

Responsing with image has been recognized as an important capability for an intelligent conversational agent. Yet existing works only focus on exploring the multimodal dialogue models which depend on retrieval-based methods, but neglecting generation methods. To fill in the gaps, we first present a multimodal dialogue generation model, which takes the dialogue history as input, then generates a textual sequence or an image as response. Learning such a model often requires multimodal dialogues containing both texts and images which are difficult to obtain. Motivated by the challenge in practice, we consider multimodal dialogue generation under a natural assumption that only limited training examples are available. In such a low-resource setting, we devise a novel conversational agent, Divter, in order to isolate parameters that depend on multimodal dialogues from the entire generation model. By this means, the major part of the model can be learned from a large number of text-only dialogues and text-image pairs respectively, then the whole parameters can be well fitted using the limited training examples. Extensive experiments demonstrate our method achieves state-of-the-art results in both automatic and human evaluation, and can generate informative text and high-resolution image responses.

In this work, we investigate the human perception of coherence in open-domain dialogues. In particular, we address the problem of annotating and modeling the coherence of next-turn candidates while considering the entire history of the dialogue. First, we create the Switchboard Coherence (SWBD-Coh) corpus, a dataset of human-human spoken dialogues annotated with turn coherence ratings, where next-turn candidate utterances ratings are provided considering the full dialogue context. Our statistical analysis of the corpus indicates how turn coherence perception is affected by patterns of distribution of entities previously introduced and the Dialogue Acts used. Second, we experiment with different architectures to model entities, Dialogue Acts and their combination and evaluate their performance in predicting human coherence ratings on SWBD-Coh. We find that models combining both DA and entity information yield the best performances both for response selection and turn coherence rating.

This paper gives an overview of the Schema-Guided Dialogue State Tracking task of the 8th Dialogue System Technology Challenge. The goal of this task is to develop dialogue state tracking models suitable for large-scale virtual assistants, with a focus on data-efficient joint modeling across domains and zero-shot generalization to new APIs. This task provided a new dataset consisting of over 16000 dialogues in the training set spanning 16 domains to highlight these challenges, and a baseline model capable of zero-shot generalization to new APIs. Twenty-five teams participated, developing a range of neural network models, exceeding the performance of the baseline model by a very high margin. The submissions incorporated a variety of pre-trained encoders and data augmentation techniques. This paper describes the task definition, dataset and evaluation methodology. We also summarize the approach and results of the submitted systems to highlight the overall trends in the state-of-the-art.

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has revolutionized the generation of emotional support conversations (ESC), offering scalable solutions with reduced costs and enhanced data privacy. This paper explores the role of personas in the creation of ESC by LLMs. Our research utilizes established psychological frameworks to measure and infuse persona traits into LLMs, which then generate dialogues in the emotional support scenario. We conduct extensive evaluations to understand the stability of persona traits in dialogues, examining shifts in traits post-generation and their impact on dialogue quality and strategy distribution. Experimental results reveal several notable findings: 1) LLMs can infer core persona traits, 2) subtle shifts in emotionality and extraversion occur, influencing the dialogue dynamics, and 3) the application of persona traits modifies the distribution of emotional support strategies, enhancing the relevance and empathetic quality of the responses. These findings highlight the potential of persona-driven LLMs in crafting more personalized, empathetic, and effective emotional support dialogues, which has significant implications for the future design of AI-driven emotional support systems.

Controversy is a reflection of our zeitgeist, and an important aspect to any discourse. The rise of large language models (LLMs) as conversational systems has increased public reliance on these systems for answers to their various questions. Consequently, it is crucial to systematically examine how these models respond to questions that pertaining to ongoing debates. However, few such datasets exist in providing human-annotated labels reflecting the contemporary discussions. To foster research in this area, we propose a novel construction of a controversial questions dataset, expanding upon the publicly released Quora Question Pairs Dataset. This dataset presents challenges concerning knowledge recency, safety, fairness, and bias. We evaluate different LLMs using a subset of this dataset, illuminating how they handle controversial issues and the stances they adopt. This research ultimately contributes to our understanding of LLMs' interaction with controversial issues, paving the way for improvements in their comprehension and handling of complex societal debates.

Annotating task-oriented dialogues is notorious for the expensive and difficult data collection process. Few-shot dialogue state tracking (DST) is a realistic solution to this problem. In this paper, we hypothesize that dialogue summaries are essentially unstructured dialogue states; hence, we propose to reformulate dialogue state tracking as a dialogue summarization problem. To elaborate, we train a text-to-text language model with synthetic template-based dialogue summaries, generated by a set of rules from the dialogue states. Then, the dialogue states can be recovered by inversely applying the summary generation rules. We empirically show that our method DS2 outperforms previous works on few-shot DST in MultiWoZ 2.0 and 2.1, in both cross-domain and multi-domain settings. Our method also exhibits vast speedup during both training and inference as it can generate all states at once. Finally, based on our analysis, we discover that the naturalness of the summary templates plays a key role for successful training.

Consistency is a long standing issue faced by dialogue models. In this paper, we frame the consistency of dialogue agents as natural language inference (NLI) and create a new natural language inference dataset called Dialogue NLI. We propose a method which demonstrates that a model trained on Dialogue NLI can be used to improve the consistency of a dialogue model, and evaluate the method with human evaluation and with automatic metrics on a suite of evaluation sets designed to measure a dialogue model's consistency.

In open-domain dialogue generation tasks, contexts and responses in most datasets are one-to-one mapped, violating an important many-to-many characteristic: a context leads to various responses, and a response answers multiple contexts. Without such patterns, models poorly generalize and prefer responding safely. Many attempts have been made in either multi-turn settings from a one-to-many perspective or in a many-to-many perspective but limited to single-turn settings. The major challenge to many-to-many augment multi-turn dialogues is that discretely replacing each turn with semantic similarity breaks fragile context coherence. In this paper, we propose DialoGue Path Sampling (DialoGPS) method in continuous semantic space, the first many-to-many augmentation method for multi-turn dialogues. Specifically, we map a dialogue to our extended Brownian Bridge, a special Gaussian process. We sample latent variables to form coherent dialogue paths in the continuous space. A dialogue path corresponds to a new multi-turn dialogue and is used as augmented training data. We show the effect of DialoGPS with both automatic and human evaluation.

Sharing ideas through communication with peers is the primary mode of human interaction. Consequently, extensive research has been conducted in the area of conversational AI, leading to an increase in the availability and diversity of conversational tasks, datasets, and methods. However, with numerous tasks being explored simultaneously, the current landscape of conversational AI becomes fragmented. Therefore, initiating a well-thought-out model for a dialogue agent can pose significant challenges for a practitioner. Towards highlighting the critical ingredients needed for a practitioner to design a dialogue agent from scratch, the current study provides a comprehensive overview of the primary characteristics of a dialogue agent, the supporting tasks, their corresponding open-domain datasets, and the methods used to benchmark these datasets. We observe that different methods have been used to tackle distinct dialogue tasks. However, building separate models for each task is costly and does not leverage the correlation among the several tasks of a dialogue agent. As a result, recent trends suggest a shift towards building unified foundation models. To this end, we propose UNIT, a UNified dIalogue dataseT constructed from conversations of existing datasets for different dialogue tasks capturing the nuances for each of them. We also examine the evaluation strategies used to measure the performance of dialogue agents and highlight the scope for future research in the area of conversational AI.

To quantify how well natural language understanding models can capture consistency in a general conversation, we introduce the DialoguE COntradiction DEtection task (DECODE) and a new conversational dataset containing both human-human and human-bot contradictory dialogues. We then compare a structured utterance-based approach of using pre-trained Transformer models for contradiction detection with the typical unstructured approach. Results reveal that: (i) our newly collected dataset is notably more effective at providing supervision for the dialogue contradiction detection task than existing NLI data including those aimed to cover the dialogue domain; (ii) the structured utterance-based approach is more robust and transferable on both analysis and out-of-distribution dialogues than its unstructured counterpart. We also show that our best contradiction detection model correlates well with human judgments and further provide evidence for its usage in both automatically evaluating and improving the consistency of state-of-the-art generative chatbots.

In the past few years, the growth of e-commerce and digital marketing in Vietnam has generated a huge volume of opinionated data. Analyzing those data would provide enterprises with insight for better business decisions. In this work, as part of the Advosights project, we study sentiment analysis of product reviews in Vietnamese. The final solution is based on Self-attention neural networks, a flexible architecture for text classification task with about 90.16% of accuracy in 0.0124 second, a very fast inference time.

Understanding the reason for emotional support response is crucial for establishing connections between users and emotional support dialogue systems. Previous works mostly focus on generating better responses but ignore interpretability, which is extremely important for constructing reliable dialogue systems. To empower the system with better interpretability, we propose an emotional support response generation scheme, named Emotion-Focused and Strategy-Driven Chain-of-Thought (ESCoT), mimicking the process of identifying, understanding, and regulating emotions. Specially, we construct a new dataset with ESCoT in two steps: (1) Dialogue Generation where we first generate diverse conversation situations, then enhance dialogue generation using richer emotional support strategies based on these situations; (2) Chain Supplement where we focus on supplementing selected dialogues with elements such as emotion, stimuli, appraisal, and strategy reason, forming the manually verified chains. Additionally, we further develop a model to generate dialogue responses with better interpretability. We also conduct extensive experiments and human evaluations to validate the effectiveness of the proposed ESCoT and generated dialogue responses. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/TeigenZhang/ESCoT{https://github.com/TeigenZhang/ESCoT}.

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.

The increasing amount of political debates and politics-related discussions calls for the definition of novel computational methods to automatically analyse such content with the final goal of lightening up political deliberation to citizens. However, the specificity of the political language and the argumentative form of these debates (employing hidden communication strategies and leveraging implicit arguments) make this task very challenging, even for current general-purpose pre-trained Language Models. To address this issue, we introduce a novel pre-trained Language Model for political discourse language called RooseBERT. Pre-training a language model on a specialised domain presents different technical and linguistic challenges, requiring extensive computational resources and large-scale data. RooseBERT has been trained on large political debate and speech corpora (8K debates, each composed of several sub-debates on different topics) in English. To evaluate its performances, we fine-tuned it on four downstream tasks related to political debate analysis, i.e., named entity recognition, sentiment analysis, argument component detection and classification, and argument relation prediction and classification. Our results demonstrate significant improvements over general-purpose Language Models on these four tasks, highlighting how domain-specific pre-training enhances performance in political debate analysis. We release the RooseBERT language model for the research community.

Dialogue Policy Learning is a key component in a task-oriented dialogue system (TDS) that decides the next action of the system given the dialogue state at each turn. Reinforcement Learning (RL) is commonly chosen to learn the dialogue policy, regarding the user as the environment and the system as the agent. Many benchmark datasets and algorithms have been created to facilitate the development and evaluation of dialogue policy based on RL. In this paper, we survey recent advances and challenges in dialogue policy from the prescriptive of RL. More specifically, we identify the major problems and summarize corresponding solutions for RL-based dialogue policy learning. Besides, we provide a comprehensive survey of applying RL to dialogue policy learning by categorizing recent methods into basic elements in RL. We believe this survey can shed a light on future research in dialogue management.

Recent advancements in conversational AI have created an urgent need for safety guardrails that prevent users from being exposed to offensive and dangerous content. Much of this work relies on human ratings and feedback, but does not account for the fact that perceptions of offense and safety are inherently subjective and that there may be systematic disagreements between raters that align with their socio-demographic identities. Instead, current machine learning approaches largely ignore rater subjectivity and use gold standards that obscure disagreements (e.g., through majority voting). In order to better understand the socio-cultural leanings of such tasks, we propose a comprehensive disagreement analysis framework to measure systematic diversity in perspectives among different rater subgroups. We then demonstrate its utility by applying this framework to a dataset of human-chatbot conversations rated by a demographically diverse pool of raters. Our analysis reveals specific rater groups that have more diverse perspectives than the rest, and informs demographic axes that are crucial to consider for safety annotations.

Texts can convey several types of inter-related information concerning opinions and attitudes. Such information includes the author's attitude towards mentioned entities, attitudes of the entities towards each other, positive and negative effects on the entities in the described situations. In this paper, we described the lexicon RuSentiFrames for Russian, where predicate words and expressions are collected and linked to so-called sentiment frames conveying several types of presupposed information on attitudes and effects. We applied the created frames in the task of extracting attitudes from a large news collection.

Creating a system that can have meaningful conversations with humans to help accomplish tasks is one of the ultimate goals of Artificial Intelligence (AI). It has defined the meaning of AI since the beginning. A lot has been accomplished in this area recently, with voice assistant products entering our daily lives and chat bot systems becoming commonplace in customer service. At first glance there seems to be no shortage of options for dialogue systems. However, the frequently deployed dialogue systems today seem to all struggle with a critical weakness - they are hard to build and harder to maintain. At the core of the struggle is the need to script every single turn of interactions between the bot and the human user. This makes the dialogue systems more difficult to maintain as the tasks become more complex and more tasks are added to the system. In this paper, we propose Converse, a flexible tree-based modular task-oriented dialogue system. Converse uses an and-or tree structure to represent tasks and offers powerful multi-task dialogue management. Converse supports task dependency and task switching, which are unique features compared to other open-source dialogue frameworks. At the same time, Converse aims to make the bot building process easy and simple, for both professional and non-professional software developers. The code is available at https://github.com/salesforce/Converse.

To provide consistent emotional interaction with users, dialog systems should be capable to automatically select appropriate emotions for responses like humans. However, most existing works focus on rendering specified emotions in responses or empathetically respond to the emotion of users, yet the individual difference in emotion expression is overlooked. This may lead to inconsistent emotional expressions and disinterest users. To tackle this issue, we propose to equip the dialog system with personality and enable it to automatically select emotions in responses by simulating the emotion transition of humans in conversation. In detail, the emotion of the dialog system is transitioned from its preceding emotion in context. The transition is triggered by the preceding dialog context and affected by the specified personality trait. To achieve this, we first model the emotion transition in the dialog system as the variation between the preceding emotion and the response emotion in the Valence-Arousal-Dominance (VAD) emotion space. Then, we design neural networks to encode the preceding dialog context and the specified personality traits to compose the variation. Finally, the emotion for response is selected from the sum of the preceding emotion and the variation. We construct a dialog dataset with emotion and personality labels and conduct emotion prediction tasks for evaluation. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of the personality-affected emotion transition.

In this paper, we present an approach for translating word embeddings from a majority language into 4 minority languages: Erzya, Moksha, Udmurt and Komi-Zyrian. Furthermore, we align these word embeddings and present a novel neural network model that is trained on English data to conduct sentiment analysis and then applied on endangered language data through the aligned word embeddings. To test our model, we annotated a small sentiment analysis corpus for the 4 endangered languages and Finnish. Our method reached at least 56\% accuracy for each endangered language. The models and the sentiment corpus will be released together with this paper. Our research shows that state-of-the-art neural models can be used with endangered languages with the only requirement being a dictionary between the endangered language and a majority language.

Most End-to-End SLU methods depend on the pretrained ASR or language model features for intent prediction. However, other essential information in speech, such as prosody, is often ignored. Recent research has shown improved results in classifying dialogue acts by incorporating prosodic information. The margins of improvement in these methods are minimal as the neural models ignore prosodic features. In this work, we propose prosody-attention, which uses the prosodic features differently to generate attention maps across time frames of the utterance. Then we propose prosody-distillation to explicitly learn the prosodic information in the acoustic encoder rather than concatenating the implicit prosodic features. Both the proposed methods improve the baseline results, and the prosody-distillation method gives an intent classification accuracy improvement of 8\% and 2\% on SLURP and STOP datasets over the prosody baseline.

Inspired by the curvature of space-time (Einstein, 1921), we introduce Curved Contrastive Learning (CCL), a novel representation learning technique for learning the relative turn distance between utterance pairs in multi-turn dialogues. The resulting bi-encoder models can guide transformers as a response ranking model towards a goal in a zero-shot fashion by projecting the goal utterance and the corresponding reply candidates into a latent space. Here the cosine similarity indicates the distance/reachability of a candidate utterance toward the corresponding goal. Furthermore, we explore how these forward-entailing language representations can be utilized for assessing the likelihood of sequences by the entailment strength i.e. through the cosine similarity of its individual members (encoded separately) as an emergent property in the curved space. These non-local properties allow us to imagine the likelihood of future patterns in dialogues, specifically by ordering/identifying future goal utterances that are multiple turns away, given a dialogue context. As part of our analysis, we investigate characteristics that make conversations (un)plannable and find strong evidence of planning capability over multiple turns (in 61.56% over 3 turns) in conversations from the DailyDialog (Li et al., 2017) dataset. Finally, we show how we achieve higher efficiency in sequence modeling tasks compared to previous work thanks to our relativistic approach, where only the last utterance needs to be encoded and computed during inference.

Perception and expression of emotion are key factors to the success of dialogue systems or conversational agents. However, this problem has not been studied in large-scale conversation generation so far. In this paper, we propose Emotional Chatting Machine (ECM) that can generate appropriate responses not only in content (relevant and grammatical) but also in emotion (emotionally consistent). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that addresses the emotion factor in large-scale conversation generation. ECM addresses the factor using three new mechanisms that respectively (1) models the high-level abstraction of emotion expressions by embedding emotion categories, (2) captures the change of implicit internal emotion states, and (3) uses explicit emotion expressions with an external emotion vocabulary. Experiments show that the proposed model can generate responses appropriate not only in content but also in emotion.

Users interacting with voice assistants today need to phrase their requests in a very specific manner to elicit an appropriate response. This limits the user experience, and is partly due to the lack of reasoning capabilities of dialogue platforms and the hand-crafted rules that require extensive labor. One possible way to improve user experience and relieve the manual efforts of designers is to build an end-to-end dialogue system that can do reasoning itself while perceiving user's utterances. In this work, we propose a novel method to incorporate the knowledge reasoning capability into dialogue systems in a more scalable and generalizable manner. Our proposed method allows a single transformer model to directly walk on a large-scale knowledge graph to generate responses. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to have transformer models generate responses by reasoning over differentiable knowledge graphs. We investigate the reasoning abilities of the proposed method on both task-oriented and domain-specific chit-chat dialogues. Empirical results show that this method can effectively and efficiently incorporate a knowledge graph into a dialogue system with fully-interpretable reasoning paths.

This survey provides a comprehensive review of research on multi-turn dialogue systems, with a particular focus on multi-turn dialogue systems based on large language models (LLMs). This paper aims to (a) give a summary of existing LLMs and approaches for adapting LLMs to downstream tasks; (b) elaborate recent advances in multi-turn dialogue systems, covering both LLM-based open-domain dialogue (ODD) and task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems, along with datasets and evaluation metrics; (c) discuss some future emphasis and recent research problems arising from the development of LLMs and the increasing demands on multi-turn dialogue systems.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased remarkable capabilities in various Natural Language Processing tasks. For automatic open-domain dialogue evaluation in particular, LLMs have been seamlessly integrated into evaluation frameworks, and together with human evaluation, compose the backbone of most evaluations. However, existing evaluation benchmarks often rely on outdated datasets and evaluate aspects like Fluency and Relevance, which fail to adequately capture the capabilities and limitations of state-of-the-art chatbot models. This paper critically examines current evaluation benchmarks, highlighting that the use of older response generators and quality aspects fail to accurately reflect modern chatbot capabilities. A small annotation experiment on a recent LLM-generated dataset (SODA) reveals that LLM evaluators such as GPT-4 struggle to detect actual deficiencies in dialogues generated by current LLM chatbots.