1.7CLOct 16, 2023
Contextual Data Augmentation for Task-Oriented Dialog SystemsDustin Axman, Avik Ray, Shubham Garg et al.
Collection of annotated dialogs for training task-oriented dialog systems have been one of the key bottlenecks in improving current models. While dialog response generation has been widely studied on the agent side, it is not evident if similar generative models can be used to generate a large variety of, and often unexpected, user inputs that real dialog systems encounter in practice. Existing data augmentation techniques such as paraphrase generation do not take the dialog context into consideration. In this paper, we develop a novel dialog augmentation model that generates a user turn, conditioning on full dialog context. Additionally, with a new prompt design for language model, and output re-ranking, the dialogs generated from our model can be directly used to train downstream dialog systems. On common benchmark datasets MultiWoZ and SGD, we show that our dialog augmentation model generates high quality dialogs and improves dialog success rate by as much as $8\%$ over baseline.
26.5CLMay 26, 2023
Code-Switched Text Synthesis in Unseen Language PairsI-Hung Hsu, Avik Ray, Shubham Garg et al.
Existing efforts on text synthesis for code-switching mostly require training on code-switched texts in the target language pairs, limiting the deployment of the models to cases lacking code-switched data. In this work, we study the problem of synthesizing code-switched texts for language pairs absent from the training data. We introduce GLOSS, a model built on top of a pre-trained multilingual machine translation model (PMMTM) with an additional code-switching module. This module, either an adapter or extra prefixes, learns code-switching patterns from code-switched data during training, while the primary component of GLOSS, i.e., the PMMTM, is frozen. The design of only adjusting the code-switching module prevents our model from overfitting to the constrained training data for code-switching. Hence, GLOSS exhibits the ability to generalize and synthesize code-switched texts across a broader spectrum of language pairs. Additionally, we develop a self-training algorithm on target language pairs further to enhance the reliability of GLOSS. Automatic evaluations on four language pairs show that GLOSS achieves at least 55% relative BLEU and METEOR scores improvements compared to strong baselines. Human evaluations on two language pairs further validate the success of GLOSS.