Lei Shen

Lei Shen, Jinchao Zhang, Jiao Ou et al.

Researches on dialogue empathy aim to endow an agent with the capacity of accurate understanding and proper responding for emotions. Existing models for empathetic dialogue generation focus on the emotion flow in one direction, that is, from the context to response. We argue that conducting an empathetic conversation is a bidirectional process, where empathy occurs when the emotions of two interlocutors could converge on the same point, i.e., reaching an emotion consensus. Besides, we also find that the empathetic dialogue corpus is extremely limited, which further restricts the model performance. To address the above issues, we propose a dual-generative model, Dual-Emp, to simultaneously construct the emotion consensus and utilize some external unpaired data. Specifically, our model integrates a forward dialogue model, a backward dialogue model, and a discrete latent variable representing the emotion consensus into a unified architecture. Then, to alleviate the constraint of paired data, we extract unpaired emotional data from open-domain conversations and employ Dual-Emp to produce pseudo paired empathetic samples, which is more efficient and low-cost than the human annotation. Automatic and human evaluations demonstrate that our method outperforms competitive baselines in producing coherent and empathetic responses.

Lei Shen, Haolan Zhan, Xin Shen et al.

Being able to reply with a related, fluent, and informative response is an indispensable requirement for building high-quality conversational agents. In order to generate better responses, some approaches have been proposed, such as feeding extra information by collecting large-scale datasets with human annotations, designing neural conversational models (NCMs) with complex architecture and loss functions, or filtering out untrustworthy samples based on a dialogue attribute, e.g., Relatedness or Genericness. In this paper, we follow the third research branch and present a data filtering method for open-domain dialogues, which identifies untrustworthy samples from training data with a quality measure that linearly combines seven dialogue attributes. The attribute weights are obtained via Bayesian Optimization (BayesOpt) that aims to optimize an objective function for dialogue generation iteratively on the validation set. Then we score training samples with the quality measure, sort them in descending order, and filter out those at the bottom. Furthermore, to accelerate the "filter-train-evaluate" iterations involved in BayesOpt on large-scale datasets, we propose a training framework that integrates maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) and negative training method (NEG). The training method updates parameters of a trained NCMs on two small sets with newly maintained and removed samples, respectively. Specifically, MLE is applied to maximize the log-likelihood of newly maintained samples, while NEG is used to minimize the log-likelihood of newly removed ones. Experimental results on two datasets show that our method can effectively identify untrustworthy samples, and NCMs trained on the filtered datasets achieve better performance.

Lei Shen, Fandong Meng, Jinchao Zhang et al.

Generating some appealing questions in open-domain conversations is an effective way to improve human-machine interactions and lead the topic to a broader or deeper direction. To avoid dull or deviated questions, some researchers tried to utilize answer, the "future" information, to guide question generation. However, they separate a post-question-answer (PQA) triple into two parts: post-question (PQ) and question-answer (QA) pairs, which may hurt the overall coherence. Besides, the QA relationship is modeled as a one-to-one mapping that is not reasonable in open-domain conversations. To tackle these problems, we propose a generative triple-wise model with hierarchical variations for open-domain conversational question generation (CQG). Latent variables in three hierarchies are used to represent the shared background of a triple and one-to-many semantic mappings in both PQ and QA pairs. Experimental results on a large-scale CQG dataset show that our method significantly improves the quality of questions in terms of fluency, coherence and diversity over competitive baselines.

Haolan Zhan, Hainan Zhang, Hongshen Chen et al.

In product description generation (PDG), the user-cared aspect is critical for the recommendation system, which can not only improve user's experiences but also obtain more clicks. High-quality customer reviews can be considered as an ideal source to mine user-cared aspects. However, in reality, a large number of new products (known as long-tailed commodities) cannot gather sufficient amount of customer reviews, which brings a big challenge in the product description generation task. Existing works tend to generate the product description solely based on item information, i.e., product attributes or title words, which leads to tedious contents and cannot attract customers effectively. To tackle this problem, we propose an adaptive posterior network based on Transformer architecture that can utilize user-cared information from customer reviews. Specifically, we first extend the self-attentive Transformer encoder to encode product titles and attributes. Then, we apply an adaptive posterior distillation module to utilize useful review information, which integrates user-cared aspects to the generation process. Finally, we apply a Transformer-based decoding phase with copy mechanism to automatically generate the product description. Besides, we also collect a large-scare Chinese product description dataset to support our work and further research in this field. Experimental results show that our model is superior to traditional generative models in both automatic indicators and human evaluation.

Lei Shen, Haolan Zhan, Xin Shen et al.

Open-domain multi-turn conversations mainly have three features, which are hierarchical semantic structure, redundant information, and long-term dependency. Grounded on these, selecting relevant context becomes a challenge step for multi-turn dialogue generation. However, existing methods cannot differentiate both useful words and utterances in long distances from a response. Besides, previous work just performs context selection based on a state in the decoder, which lacks a global guidance and could lead some focuses on irrelevant or unnecessary information. In this paper, we propose a novel model with hierarchical self-attention mechanism and distant supervision to not only detect relevant words and utterances in short and long distances, but also discern related information globally when decoding. Experimental results on two public datasets of both automatic and human evaluations show that our model significantly outperforms other baselines in terms of fluency, coherence, and informativeness.

Haolan Zhan, Hainan Zhang, Hongshen Chen et al.

Recommendation reason generation, aiming at showing the selling points of products for customers, plays a vital role in attracting customers' attention as well as improving user experience. A simple and effective way is to extract keywords directly from the knowledge-base of products, i.e., attributes or title, as the recommendation reason. However, generating recommendation reason from product knowledge doesn't naturally respond to users' interests. Fortunately, on some E-commerce websites, there exists more and more user-generated content (user-content for short), i.e., product question-answering (QA) discussions, which reflect user-cared aspects. Therefore, in this paper, we consider generating the recommendation reason by taking into account not only the product attributes but also the customer-generated product QA discussions. In reality, adequate user-content is only possible for the most popular commodities, whereas large sums of long-tail products or new products cannot gather a sufficient number of user-content. To tackle this problem, we propose a user-inspired multi-source posterior transformer (MSPT), which induces the model reflecting the users' interests with a posterior multiple QA discussions module, and generating recommendation reasons containing the product attributes as well as the user-cared aspects. Experimental results show that our model is superior to traditional generative models. Additionally, the analysis also shows that our model can focus more on the user-cared aspects than baselines.

Lei Shen, Xiaoyu Guo, Meng Chen

Chinese poetry is an important part of worldwide culture, and classical and modern sub-branches are quite different. The former is a unique genre and has strict constraints, while the latter is very flexible in length, optional to have rhymes, and similar to modern poetry in other languages. Thus, it requires more to control the coherence and improve the novelty. In this paper, we propose a generate-retrieve-then-refine paradigm to jointly improve the coherence and novelty. In the first stage, a draft is generated given keywords (i.e., topics) only. The second stage produces a "refining vector" from retrieval lines. At last, we take into consideration both the draft and the "refining vector" to generate a new poem. The draft provides future sentence-level information for a line to be generated. Meanwhile, the "refining vector" points out the direction of refinement based on impressive words detection mechanism which can learn good patterns from references and then create new ones via insertion operation. Experimental results on a collected large-scale modern Chinese poetry dataset show that our proposed approach can not only generate more coherent poems, but also improve the diversity and novelty.

Lei Shen, Yang Feng

Emotion-controllable response generation is an attractive and valuable task that aims to make open-domain conversations more empathetic and engaging. Existing methods mainly enhance the emotion expression by adding regularization terms to standard cross-entropy loss and thus influence the training process. However, due to the lack of further consideration of content consistency, the common problem of response generation tasks, safe response, is intensified. Besides, query emotions that can help model the relationship between query and response are simply ignored in previous models, which would further hurt the coherence. To alleviate these problems, we propose a novel framework named Curriculum Dual Learning (CDL) which extends the emotion-controllable response generation to a dual task to generate emotional responses and emotional queries alternatively. CDL utilizes two rewards focusing on emotion and content to improve the duality. Additionally, it applies curriculum learning to gradually generate high-quality responses based on the difficulties of expressing various emotions. Experimental results show that CDL significantly outperforms the baselines in terms of coherence, diversity, and relation to emotion factors.

Meng Chen, Ruixue Liu, Lei Shen et al.

Human conversations are complicated and building a human-like dialogue agent is an extremely challenging task. With the rapid development of deep learning techniques, data-driven models become more and more prevalent which need a huge amount of real conversation data. In this paper, we construct a large-scale real scenario Chinese E-commerce conversation corpus, JDDC, with more than 1 million multi-turn dialogues, 20 million utterances, and 150 million words. The dataset reflects several characteristics of human-human conversations, e.g., goal-driven, and long-term dependency among the context. It also covers various dialogue types including task-oriented, chitchat and question-answering. Extra intent information and three well-annotated challenge sets are also provided. Then, we evaluate several retrieval-based and generative models to provide basic benchmark performance on the JDDC corpus. And we hope JDDC can serve as an effective testbed and benefit the development of fundamental research in dialogue task

Lei Shen, Yang Feng, Haolan Zhan

Multi-turn conversations consist of complex semantic structures, and it is still a challenge to generate coherent and diverse responses given previous utterances. It's practical that a conversation takes place under a background, meanwhile, the query and response are usually most related and they are consistent in topic but also different in content. However, little work focuses on such hierarchical relationship among utterances. To address this problem, we propose a Conversational Semantic Relationship RNN (CSRR) model to construct the dependency explicitly. The model contains latent variables in three hierarchies. The discourse-level one captures the global background, the pair-level one stands for the common topic information between query and response, and the utterance-level ones try to represent differences in content. Experimental results show that our model significantly improves the quality of responses in terms of fluency, coherence and diversity compared to baseline methods.

Wen Zhang, Liang Huang, Yang Feng et al.

Although neural machine translation has achieved promising results, it suffers from slow translation speed. The direct consequence is that a trade-off has to be made between translation quality and speed, thus its performance can not come into full play. We apply cube pruning, a popular technique to speed up dynamic programming, into neural machine translation to speed up the translation. To construct the equivalence class, similar target hidden states are combined, leading to less RNN expansion operations on the target side and less \$\mathrm{softmax}\$ operations over the large target vocabulary. The experiments show that, at the same or even better translation quality, our method can translate faster compared with naive beam search by \$3.3\times\$ on GPUs and \$3.5\times\$ on CPUs.

Lei Shen, Junlin Zhang

Recurrent Neural Networks have achieved state-of-the-art results for many problems in NLP and two most popular RNN architectures are Tail Model and Pooling Model. In this paper, a hybrid architecture is proposed and we present the first empirical study using LSTMs to compare performance of the three RNN structures on sentence classification task. Experimental results show that the Max Pooling Model or Hybrid Max Pooling Model achieves the best performance on most datasets, while Tail Model does not outperform other models.