Benoît Favre

Léo Jacqmin, Lina M. Rojas-Barahona, Benoit Favre

While communicating with a user, a task-oriented dialogue system has to track the user's needs at each turn according to the conversation history. This process called dialogue state tracking (DST) is crucial because it directly informs the downstream dialogue policy. DST has received a lot of interest in recent years with the text-to-text paradigm emerging as the favored approach. In this review paper, we first present the task and its associated datasets. Then, considering a large number of recent publications, we identify highlights and advances of research in 2021-2022. Although neural approaches have enabled significant progress, we argue that some critical aspects of dialogue systems such as generalizability are still underexplored. To motivate future studies, we propose several research avenues.

Valentin Pelloin, Franck Dary, Nicolas Herve et al.

We aim at improving spoken language modeling (LM) using very large amount of automatically transcribed speech. We leverage the INA (French National Audiovisual Institute) collection and obtain 19GB of text after applying ASR on 350,000 hours of diverse TV shows. From this, spoken language models are trained either by fine-tuning an existing LM (FlauBERT) or through training a LM from scratch. New models (FlauBERT-Oral) are shared with the community and evaluated for 3 downstream tasks: spoken language understanding, classification of TV shows and speech syntactic parsing. Results show that FlauBERT-Oral can be beneficial compared to its initial FlauBERT version demonstrating that, despite its inherent noisy nature, ASR-generated text can be used to build spoken language models.

Mitja Nikolaus, Emmanuelle Salin, Stephane Ayache et al.

Recent advances in vision-and-language modeling have seen the development of Transformer architectures that achieve remarkable performance on multimodal reasoning tasks. Yet, the exact capabilities of these black-box models are still poorly understood. While much of previous work has focused on studying their ability to learn meaning at the word-level, their ability to track syntactic dependencies between words has received less attention. We take a first step in closing this gap by creating a new multimodal task targeted at evaluating understanding of predicate-noun dependencies in a controlled setup. We evaluate a range of state-of-the-art models and find that their performance on the task varies considerably, with some models performing relatively well and others at chance level. In an effort to explain this variability, our analyses indicate that the quality (and not only sheer quantity) of pretraining data is essential. Additionally, the best performing models leverage fine-grained multimodal pretraining objectives in addition to the standard image-text matching objectives. This study highlights that targeted and controlled evaluations are a crucial step for a precise and rigorous test of the multimodal knowledge of vision-and-language models.

Léo Jacqmin, Lucas Druart, Yannick Estève et al.

Though Dialogue State Tracking (DST) is a core component of spoken dialogue systems, recent work on this task mostly deals with chat corpora, disregarding the discrepancies between spoken and written language.In this paper, we propose OLISIA, a cascade system which integrates an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) model and a DST model. We introduce several adaptations in the ASR and DST modules to improve integration and robustness to spoken conversations.With these adaptations, our system ranked first in DSTC11 Track 3, a benchmark to evaluate spoken DST. We conduct an in-depth analysis of the results and find that normalizing the ASR outputs and adapting the DST inputs through data augmentation, along with increasing the pre-trained models size all play an important role in reducing the performance discrepancy between written and spoken conversations.

Lucas Druart, Léo Jacqmin, Benoît Favre et al.

In Task-Oriented Dialogue (TOD) systems, correctly updating the system's understanding of the user's needs is key to a smooth interaction. Traditionally TOD systems are composed of several modules that interact with one another. While each of these components is the focus of active research communities, their behavior in interaction can be overlooked. This paper proposes a comprehensive analysis of the errors of state of the art systems in complex settings such as Dialogue State Tracking which highly depends on the dialogue context. Based on spoken MultiWoz, we identify that errors on non-categorical slots' values are essential to address in order to bridge the gap between spoken and chat-based dialogue systems. We explore potential solutions to improve transcriptions and help dialogue state tracking generative models correct such errors.

Eunice Akani, Benoit Favre, Frederic Bechet et al.

Dialogue summarization aims to provide a concise and coherent summary of conversations between multiple speakers. While recent advancements in language models have enhanced this process, summarizing dialogues accurately and faithfully remains challenging due to the need to understand speaker interactions and capture relevant information. Indeed, abstractive models used for dialog summarization may generate summaries that contain inconsistencies. We suggest using the semantic information proposed for performing Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) in human-machine dialogue systems for goal-oriented human-human dialogues to obtain a more semantically faithful summary regarding the task. This study introduces three key contributions: First, we propose an exploration of how incorporating task-related information can enhance the summarization process, leading to more semantically accurate summaries. Then, we introduce a new evaluation criterion based on task semantics. Finally, we propose a new dataset version with increased annotated data standardized for research on task-oriented dialogue summarization. The study evaluates these methods using the DECODA corpus, a collection of French spoken dialogues from a call center. Results show that integrating models with task-related information improves summary accuracy, even with varying word error rates.

Simon Lupart, Benoit Favre, Vassilina Nikoulina et al.

MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) is a large thesaurus created by the National Library of Medicine and used for fine-grained indexing of publications in the biomedical domain. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, MeSH descriptors have emerged in relation to articles published on the corresponding topic. Zero-shot classification is an adequate response for timely labeling of the stream of papers with MeSH categories. In this work, we hypothesise that rich semantic information available in MeSH has potential to improve BioBERT representations and make them more suitable for zero-shot/few-shot tasks. We frame the problem as determining if MeSH term definitions, concatenated with paper abstracts are valid instances or not, and leverage multi-task learning to induce the MeSH hierarchy in the representations thanks to a seq2seq task. Results establish a baseline on the MedLine and LitCovid datasets, and probing shows that the resulting representations convey the hierarchical relations present in MeSH.

Mickael Rouvier, Benoit Favre

Creating sentiment polarity lexicons is labor intensive. Automatically translating them from resourceful languages requires in-domain machine translation systems, which rely on large quantities of bi-texts. In this paper, we propose to replace machine translation by transferring words from the lexicon through word embeddings aligned across languages with a simple linear transform. The approach leads to no degradation, compared to machine translation, when tested on sentiment polarity classification on tweets from four languages.