7.3ASApr 27, 2022
Ultra Fast Speech Separation Model with Teacher Student LearningSanyuan Chen, Yu Wu, Zhuo Chen et al.
Transformer has been successfully applied to speech separation recently with its strong long-dependency modeling capacity using a self-attention mechanism. However, Transformer tends to have heavy run-time costs due to the deep encoder layers, which hinders its deployment on edge devices. A small Transformer model with fewer encoder layers is preferred for computational efficiency, but it is prone to performance degradation. In this paper, an ultra fast speech separation Transformer model is proposed to achieve both better performance and efficiency with teacher student learning (T-S learning). We introduce layer-wise T-S learning and objective shifting mechanisms to guide the small student model to learn intermediate representations from the large teacher model. Compared with the small Transformer model trained from scratch, the proposed T-S learning method reduces the word error rate (WER) by more than 5% for both multi-channel and single-channel speech separation on LibriCSS dataset. Utilizing more unlabeled speech data, our ultra fast speech separation models achieve more than 10% relative WER reduction.
3.3CLJun 28, 2023
Accelerating Transducers through Adjacent Token MergingYuang Li, Yu Wu, Jinyu Li et al.
Recent end-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems often utilize a Transformer-based acoustic encoder that generates embedding at a high frame rate. However, this design is inefficient, particularly for long speech signals due to the quadratic computation of self-attention. To address this, we propose a new method, Adjacent Token Merging (A-ToMe), which gradually combines adjacent tokens with high similarity scores between their key values. In this way, the total time step could be reduced, and the inference of both the encoder and joint network is accelerated. Experiments on LibriSpeech show that our method can reduce 57% of tokens and improve the inference speed on GPU by 70% without any notable loss of accuracy. Additionally, we demonstrate that A-ToMe is also an effective solution to reduce tokens in long-form ASR, where the input speech consists of multiple utterances.
Text-based Aerial-Ground Person RetrievalXinyu Zhou, Yu Wu, Jiayao Ma et al.
This work introduces Text-based Aerial-Ground Person Retrieval (TAG-PR), which aims to retrieve person images from heterogeneous aerial and ground views with textual descriptions. Unlike traditional Text-based Person Retrieval (T-PR), which focuses solely on ground-view images, TAG-PR introduces greater practical significance and presents unique challenges due to the large viewpoint discrepancy across images. To support this task, we contribute: (1) TAG-PEDES dataset, constructed from public benchmarks with automatically generated textual descriptions, enhanced by a diversified text generation paradigm to ensure robustness under view heterogeneity; and (2) TAG-CLIP, a novel retrieval framework that addresses view heterogeneity through a hierarchically-routed mixture of experts module to learn view-specific and view-agnostic features and a viewpoint decoupling strategy to decouple view-specific features for better cross-modal alignment. We evaluate the effectiveness of TAG-CLIP on both the proposed TAG-PEDES dataset and existing T-PR benchmarks. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/Flame-Chasers/TAG-PR.
MuTual: A Dataset for Multi-Turn Dialogue ReasoningLeyang Cui, Yu Wu, Shujie Liu et al.
Non-task oriented dialogue systems have achieved great success in recent years due to largely accessible conversation data and the development of deep learning techniques. Given a context, current systems are able to yield a relevant and fluent response, but sometimes make logical mistakes because of weak reasoning capabilities. To facilitate the conversation reasoning research, we introduce MuTual, a novel dataset for Multi-Turn dialogue Reasoning, consisting of 8,860 manually annotated dialogues based on Chinese student English listening comprehension exams. Compared to previous benchmarks for non-task oriented dialogue systems, MuTual is much more challenging since it requires a model that can handle various reasoning problems. Empirical results show that state-of-the-art methods only reach 71%, which is far behind the human performance of 94%, indicating that there is ample room for improving reasoning ability. MuTual is available at https://github.com/Nealcly/MuTual.
6.4LGSep 24, 2024
Learning To Help: Training Models to Assist Legacy DevicesYu Wu, Anand Sarwate
Machine learning models implemented in hardware on physical devices may be deployed for a long time. The computational abilities of the device may be limited and become outdated with respect to newer improvements. Because of the size of ML models, offloading some computation (e.g. to an edge cloud) can help such legacy devices. We cast this problem in the framework of learning with abstention (LWA) in which the expert (edge) must be trained to assist the client (device). Prior work on LWA trains the client assuming the edge is either an oracle or a human expert. In this work, we formalize the reverse problem of training the expert for a fixed (legacy) client. As in LWA, the client uses a rejection rule to decide when to offload inference to the expert (at a cost). We find the Bayes-optimal rule, prove a generalization bound, and find a consistent surrogate loss function. Empirical results show that our framework outperforms confidence-based rejection rules.
4.6LGNov 12, 2024
EAPCR: A Universal Feature Extractor for Scientific Data without Explicit Feature Relation PatternsZhuohang Yu, Ling An, Yansong Li et al.
Conventional methods, including Decision Tree (DT)-based methods, have been effective in scientific tasks, such as non-image medical diagnostics, system anomaly detection, and inorganic catalysis efficiency prediction. However, most deep-learning techniques have struggled to surpass or even match this level of success as traditional machine-learning methods. The primary reason is that these applications involve multi-source, heterogeneous data where features lack explicit relationships. This contrasts with image data, where pixels exhibit spatial relationships; textual data, where words have sequential dependencies; and graph data, where nodes are connected through established associations. The absence of explicit Feature Relation Patterns (FRPs) presents a significant challenge for deep learning techniques in scientific applications that are not image, text, and graph-based. In this paper, we introduce EAPCR, a universal feature extractor designed for data without explicit FRPs. Tested across various scientific tasks, EAPCR consistently outperforms traditional methods and bridges the gap where deep learning models fall short. To further demonstrate its robustness, we synthesize a dataset without explicit FRPs. While Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) and feature extractors like Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs), and Transformers struggle, EAPCR excels, demonstrating its robustness and superior performance in scientific tasks without FRPs.
WavLM: Large-Scale Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Full Stack Speech ProcessingSanyuan Chen, Chengyi Wang, Zhengyang Chen et al.
Self-supervised learning (SSL) achieves great success in speech recognition, while limited exploration has been attempted for other speech processing tasks. As speech signal contains multi-faceted information including speaker identity, paralinguistics, spoken content, etc., learning universal representations for all speech tasks is challenging. To tackle the problem, we propose a new pre-trained model, WavLM, to solve full-stack downstream speech tasks. WavLM jointly learns masked speech prediction and denoising in pre-training. By this means, WavLM does not only keep the speech content modeling capability by the masked speech prediction, but also improves the potential to non-ASR tasks by the speech denoising. In addition, WavLM employs gated relative position bias for the Transformer structure to better capture the sequence ordering of input speech. We also scale up the training dataset from 60k hours to 94k hours. WavLM Large achieves state-of-the-art performance on the SUPERB benchmark, and brings significant improvements for various speech processing tasks on their representative benchmarks. The code and pre-trained models are available at https://aka.ms/wavlm.
Knowledge Enhanced Fine-Tuning for Better Handling Unseen Entities in Dialogue GenerationLeyang Cui, Yu Wu, Shujie Liu et al.
Although pre-training models have achieved great success in dialogue generation, their performance drops dramatically when the input contains an entity that does not appear in pre-training and fine-tuning datasets (unseen entity). To address this issue, existing methods leverage an external knowledge base to generate appropriate responses. In real-world scenario, the entity may not be included by the knowledge base or suffer from the precision of knowledge retrieval. To deal with this problem, instead of introducing knowledge base as the input, we force the model to learn a better semantic representation by predicting the information in the knowledge base, only based on the input context. Specifically, with the help of a knowledge base, we introduce two auxiliary training objectives: 1) Interpret Masked Word, which conjectures the meaning of the masked entity given the context; 2) Hypernym Generation, which predicts the hypernym of the entity based on the context. Experiment results on two dialogue corpus verify the effectiveness of our methods under both knowledge available and unavailable settings.
11.3ASJun 4, 2021
Minimum Word Error Rate Training with Language Model Fusion for End-to-End Speech RecognitionZhong Meng, Yu Wu, Naoyuki Kanda et al.
Integrating external language models (LMs) into end-to-end (E2E) models remains a challenging task for domain-adaptive speech recognition. Recently, internal language model estimation (ILME)-based LM fusion has shown significant word error rate (WER) reduction from Shallow Fusion by subtracting a weighted internal LM score from an interpolation of E2E model and external LM scores during beam search. However, on different test sets, the optimal LM interpolation weights vary over a wide range and have to be tuned extensively on well-matched validation sets. In this work, we perform LM fusion in the minimum WER (MWER) training of an E2E model to obviate the need for LM weights tuning during inference. Besides MWER training with Shallow Fusion (MWER-SF), we propose a novel MWER training with ILME (MWER-ILME) where the ILME-based fusion is conducted to generate N-best hypotheses and their posteriors. Additional gradient is induced when internal LM is engaged in MWER-ILME loss computation. During inference, LM weights pre-determined in MWER training enable robust LM integrations on test sets from different domains. Experimented with 30K-hour trained transformer transducers, MWER-ILME achieves on average 8.8% and 5.8% relative WER reductions from MWER and MWER-SF training, respectively, on 6 different test sets
Template-Based Named Entity Recognition Using BARTLeyang Cui, Yu Wu, Jian Liu et al.
There is a recent interest in investigating few-shot NER, where the low-resource target domain has different label sets compared with a resource-rich source domain. Existing methods use a similarity-based metric. However, they cannot make full use of knowledge transfer in NER model parameters. To address the issue, we propose a template-based method for NER, treating NER as a language model ranking problem in a sequence-to-sequence framework, where original sentences and statement templates filled by candidate named entity span are regarded as the source sequence and the target sequence, respectively. For inference, the model is required to classify each candidate span based on the corresponding template scores. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves 92.55% F1 score on the CoNLL03 (rich-resource task), and significantly better than fine-tuning BERT 10.88%, 15.34%, and 11.73% F1 score on the MIT Movie, the MIT Restaurant, and the ATIS (low-resource task), respectively.
14.9ASMar 31, 2021
Large-Scale Pre-Training of End-to-End Multi-Talker ASR for Meeting Transcription with Single Distant MicrophoneNaoyuki Kanda, Guoli Ye, Yu Wu et al.
Transcribing meetings containing overlapped speech with only a single distant microphone (SDM) has been one of the most challenging problems for automatic speech recognition (ASR). While various approaches have been proposed, all previous studies on the monaural overlapped speech recognition problem were based on either simulation data or small-scale real data. In this paper, we extensively investigate a two-step approach where we first pre-train a serialized output training (SOT)-based multi-talker ASR by using large-scale simulation data and then fine-tune the model with a small amount of real meeting data. Experiments are conducted by utilizing 75 thousand (K) hours of our internal single-talker recording to simulate a total of 900K hours of multi-talker audio segments for supervised pre-training. With fine-tuning on the 70 hours of the AMI-SDM training data, our SOT ASR model achieves a word error rate (WER) of 21.2% for the AMI-SDM evaluation set while automatically counting speakers in each test segment. This result is not only significantly better than the previous state-of-the-art WER of 36.4% with oracle utterance boundary information but also better than a result by a similarly fine-tuned single-talker ASR model applied to beamformed audio.
UniSpeech: Unified Speech Representation Learning with Labeled and Unlabeled DataChengyi Wang, Yu Wu, Yao Qian et al.
In this paper, we propose a unified pre-training approach called UniSpeech to learn speech representations with both unlabeled and labeled data, in which supervised phonetic CTC learning and phonetically-aware contrastive self-supervised learning are conducted in a multi-task learning manner. The resultant representations can capture information more correlated with phonetic structures and improve the generalization across languages and domains. We evaluate the effectiveness of UniSpeech for cross-lingual representation learning on public CommonVoice corpus. The results show that UniSpeech outperforms self-supervised pretraining and supervised transfer learning for speech recognition by a maximum of 13.4% and 17.8% relative phone error rate reductions respectively (averaged over all testing languages). The transferability of UniSpeech is also demonstrated on a domain-shift speech recognition task, i.e., a relative word error rate reduction of 6% against the previous approach.
15.9SDOct 23, 2020
Don't shoot butterfly with rifles: Multi-channel Continuous Speech Separation with Early Exit TransformerSanyuan Chen, Yu Wu, Zhuo Chen et al.
With its strong modeling capacity that comes from a multi-head and multi-layer structure, Transformer is a very powerful model for learning a sequential representation and has been successfully applied to speech separation recently. However, multi-channel speech separation sometimes does not necessarily need such a heavy structure for all time frames especially when the cross-talker challenge happens only occasionally. For example, in conversation scenarios, most regions contain only a single active speaker, where the separation task downgrades to a single speaker enhancement problem. It turns out that using a very deep network structure for dealing with signals with a low overlap ratio not only negatively affects the inference efficiency but also hurts the separation performance. To deal with this problem, we propose an early exit mechanism, which enables the Transformer model to handle different cases with adaptive depth. Experimental results indicate that not only does the early exit mechanism accelerate the inference, but it also improves the accuracy.
15.8ASOct 22, 2020
Microsoft Speaker Diarization System for the VoxCeleb Speaker Recognition Challenge 2020Xiong Xiao, Naoyuki Kanda, Zhuo Chen et al.
This paper describes the Microsoft speaker diarization system for monaural multi-talker recordings in the wild, evaluated at the diarization track of the VoxCeleb Speaker Recognition Challenge(VoxSRC) 2020. We will first explain our system design to address issues in handling real multi-talker recordings. We then present the details of the components, which include Res2Net-based speaker embedding extractor, conformer-based continuous speech separation with leakage filtering, and a modified DOVER (short for Diarization Output Voting Error Reduction) method for system fusion. We evaluate the systems with the data set provided by VoxSRCchallenge 2020, which contains real-life multi-talker audio collected from YouTube. Our best system achieves 3.71% and 6.23% of the diarization error rate (DER) on development set and evaluation set, respectively, being ranked the 1st at the diarization track of the challenge.
8.7CLOct 22, 2020
Developing Real-time Streaming Transformer Transducer for Speech Recognition on Large-scale DatasetXie Chen, Yu Wu, Zhenghao Wang et al.
Recently, Transformer based end-to-end models have achieved great success in many areas including speech recognition. However, compared to LSTM models, the heavy computational cost of the Transformer during inference is a key issue to prevent their applications. In this work, we explored the potential of Transformer Transducer (T-T) models for the fist pass decoding with low latency and fast speed on a large-scale dataset. We combine the idea of Transformer-XL and chunk-wise streaming processing to design a streamable Transformer Transducer model. We demonstrate that T-T outperforms the hybrid model, RNN Transducer (RNN-T), and streamable Transformer attention-based encoder-decoder model in the streaming scenario. Furthermore, the runtime cost and latency can be optimized with a relatively small look-ahead.
21.0ASAug 13, 2020
Continuous Speech Separation with ConformerSanyuan Chen, Yu Wu, Zhuo Chen et al.
Continuous speech separation plays a vital role in complicated speech related tasks such as conversation transcription. The separation model extracts a single speaker signal from a mixed speech. In this paper, we use transformer and conformer in lieu of recurrent neural networks in the separation system, as we believe capturing global information with the self-attention based method is crucial for the speech separation. Evaluating on the LibriCSS dataset, the conformer separation model achieves state of the art results, with a relative 23.5% word error rate (WER) reduction from bi-directional LSTM (BLSTM) in the utterance-wise evaluation and a 15.4% WER reduction in the continuous evaluation.
On Commonsense Cues in BERT for Solving Commonsense TasksLeyang Cui, Sijie Cheng, Yu Wu et al.
BERT has been used for solving commonsense tasks such as CommonsenseQA. While prior research has found that BERT does contain commonsense information to some extent, there has been work showing that pre-trained models can rely on spurious associations (e.g., data bias) rather than key cues in solving sentiment classification and other problems. We quantitatively investigate the presence of structural commonsense cues in BERT when solving commonsense tasks, and the importance of such cues for the model prediction. Using two different measures, we find that BERT does use relevant knowledge for solving the task, and the presence of commonsense knowledge is positively correlated to the model accuracy.
On the Comparison of Popular End-to-End Models for Large Scale Speech RecognitionJinyu Li, Yu Wu, Yashesh Gaur et al.
Recently, there has been a strong push to transition from hybrid models to end-to-end (E2E) models for automatic speech recognition. Currently, there are three promising E2E methods: recurrent neural network transducer (RNN-T), RNN attention-based encoder-decoder (AED), and Transformer-AED. In this study, we conduct an empirical comparison of RNN-T, RNN-AED, and Transformer-AED models, in both non-streaming and streaming modes. We use 65 thousand hours of Microsoft anonymized training data to train these models. As E2E models are more data hungry, it is better to compare their effectiveness with large amount of training data. To the best of our knowledge, no such comprehensive study has been conducted yet. We show that although AED models are stronger than RNN-T in the non-streaming mode, RNN-T is very competitive in streaming mode if its encoder can be properly initialized. Among all three E2E models, transformer-AED achieved the best accuracy in both streaming and non-streaming mode. We show that both streaming RNN-T and transformer-AED models can obtain better accuracy than a highly-optimized hybrid model.
31.6CLApr 21, 2020
Curriculum Pre-training for End-to-End Speech TranslationChengyi Wang, Yu Wu, Shujie Liu et al.
End-to-end speech translation poses a heavy burden on the encoder, because it has to transcribe, understand, and learn cross-lingual semantics simultaneously. To obtain a powerful encoder, traditional methods pre-train it on ASR data to capture speech features. However, we argue that pre-training the encoder only through simple speech recognition is not enough and high-level linguistic knowledge should be considered. Inspired by this, we propose a curriculum pre-training method that includes an elementary course for transcription learning and two advanced courses for understanding the utterance and mapping words in two languages. The difficulty of these courses is gradually increasing. Experiments show that our curriculum pre-training method leads to significant improvements on En-De and En-Fr speech translation benchmarks.
Semantic Mask for Transformer based End-to-End Speech RecognitionChengyi Wang, Yu Wu, Yujiao Du et al.
Attention-based encoder-decoder model has achieved impressive results for both automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS) tasks. This approach takes advantage of the memorization capacity of neural networks to learn the mapping from the input sequence to the output sequence from scratch, without the assumption of prior knowledge such as the alignments. However, this model is prone to overfitting, especially when the amount of training data is limited. Inspired by SpecAugment and BERT, in this paper, we propose a semantic mask based regularization for training such kind of end-to-end (E2E) model. The idea is to mask the input features corresponding to a particular output token, e.g., a word or a word-piece, in order to encourage the model to fill the token based on the contextual information. While this approach is applicable to the encoder-decoder framework with any type of neural network architecture, we study the transformer-based model for ASR in this work. We perform experiments on Librispeech 960h and TedLium2 data sets, and achieve the state-of-the-art performance on the test set in the scope of E2E models.
30.2CLOct 18, 2019
Unsupervised Context Rewriting for Open Domain ConversationKun Zhou, Kai Zhang, Yu Wu et al.
Context modeling has a pivotal role in open domain conversation. Existing works either use heuristic methods or jointly learn context modeling and response generation with an encoder-decoder framework. This paper proposes an explicit context rewriting method, which rewrites the last utterance by considering context history. We leverage pseudo-parallel data and elaborate a context rewriting network, which is built upon the CopyNet with the reinforcement learning method. The rewritten utterance is beneficial to candidate retrieval, explainable context modeling, as well as enabling to employ a single-turn framework to the multi-turn scenario. The empirical results show that our model outperforms baselines in terms of the rewriting quality, the multi-turn response generation, and the end-to-end retrieval-based chatbots.
6.1CLSep 17, 2019
Bridging the Gap between Pre-Training and Fine-Tuning for End-to-End Speech TranslationChengyi Wang, Yu Wu, Shujie Liu et al.
End-to-end speech translation, a hot topic in recent years, aims to translate a segment of audio into a specific language with an end-to-end model. Conventional approaches employ multi-task learning and pre-training methods for this task, but they suffer from the huge gap between pre-training and fine-tuning. To address these issues, we propose a Tandem Connectionist Encoding Network (TCEN) which bridges the gap by reusing all subnets in fine-tuning, keeping the roles of subnets consistent, and pre-training the attention module. Furthermore, we propose two simple but effective methods to guarantee the speech encoder outputs and the MT encoder inputs are consistent in terms of semantic representation and sequence length. Experimental results show that our model outperforms baselines 2.2 BLEU on a large benchmark dataset.
30.4CLAug 31, 2019
Explicit Cross-lingual Pre-training for Unsupervised Machine TranslationShuo Ren, Yu Wu, Shujie Liu et al.
Pre-training has proven to be effective in unsupervised machine translation due to its ability to model deep context information in cross-lingual scenarios. However, the cross-lingual information obtained from shared BPE spaces is inexplicit and limited. In this paper, we propose a novel cross-lingual pre-training method for unsupervised machine translation by incorporating explicit cross-lingual training signals. Specifically, we first calculate cross-lingual n-gram embeddings and infer an n-gram translation table from them. With those n-gram translation pairs, we propose a new pre-training model called Cross-lingual Masked Language Model (CMLM), which randomly chooses source n-grams in the input text stream and predicts their translation candidates at each time step. Experiments show that our method can incorporate beneficial cross-lingual information into pre-trained models. Taking pre-trained CMLM models as the encoder and decoder, we significantly improve the performance of unsupervised machine translation.
32.6CLAug 22, 2018
Keyphrase Generation with Correlation ConstraintsJun Chen, Xiaoming Zhang, Yu Wu et al.
In this paper, we study automatic keyphrase generation. Although conventional approaches to this task show promising results, they neglect correlation among keyphrases, resulting in duplication and coverage issues. To solve these problems, we propose a new sequence-to-sequence architecture for keyphrase generation named CorrRNN, which captures correlation among multiple keyphrases in two ways. First, we employ a coverage vector to indicate whether the word in the source document has been summarized by previous phrases to improve the coverage for keyphrases. Second, preceding phrases are taken into account to eliminate duplicate phrases and improve result coherence. Experiment results show that our model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art method on benchmark datasets in terms of both accuracy and diversity.
3.2CLJul 19, 2018
Towards Explainable and Controllable Open Domain Dialogue Generation with Dialogue ActsCan Xu, Wei Wu, Yu Wu
We study open domain dialogue generation with dialogue acts designed to explain how people engage in social chat. To imitate human behavior, we propose managing the flow of human-machine interactions with the dialogue acts as policies. The policies and response generation are jointly learned from human-human conversations, and the former is further optimized with a reinforcement learning approach. With the dialogue acts, we achieve significant improvement over state-of-the-art methods on response quality for given contexts and dialogue length in both machine-machine simulation and human-machine conversation.
Response Generation by Context-aware Prototype EditingYu Wu, Furu Wei, Shaohan Huang et al.
Open domain response generation has achieved remarkable progress in recent years, but sometimes yields short and uninformative responses. We propose a new paradigm for response generation, that is response generation by editing, which significantly increases the diversity and informativeness of the generation results. Our assumption is that a plausible response can be generated by slightly revising an existing response prototype. The prototype is retrieved from a pre-defined index and provides a good start-point for generation because it is grammatical and informative. We design a response editing model, where an edit vector is formed by considering differences between a prototype context and a current context, and then the edit vector is fed to a decoder to revise the prototype response for the current context. Experiment results on a large scale dataset demonstrate that the response editing model outperforms generative and retrieval-based models on various aspects.
32.1CLMay 7, 2018
Learning Matching Models with Weak Supervision for Response Selection in Retrieval-based ChatbotsYu Wu, Wei Wu, Zhoujun Li et al.
We propose a method that can leverage unlabeled data to learn a matching model for response selection in retrieval-based chatbots. The method employs a sequence-to-sequence architecture (Seq2Seq) model as a weak annotator to judge the matching degree of unlabeled pairs, and then performs learning with both the weak signals and the unlabeled data. Experimental results on two public data sets indicate that matching models get significant improvements when they are learned with the proposed method.
8.3CLNov 30, 2017
Neural Response Generation with Dynamic VocabulariesYu Wu, Wei Wu, Dejian Yang et al.
We study response generation for open domain conversation in chatbots. Existing methods assume that words in responses are generated from an identical vocabulary regardless of their inputs, which not only makes them vulnerable to generic patterns and irrelevant noise, but also causes a high cost in decoding. We propose a dynamic vocabulary sequence-to-sequence (DVS2S) model which allows each input to possess their own vocabulary in decoding. In training, vocabulary construction and response generation are jointly learned by maximizing a lower bound of the true objective with a Monte Carlo sampling method. In inference, the model dynamically allocates a small vocabulary for an input with the word prediction model, and conducts decoding only with the small vocabulary. Because of the dynamic vocabulary mechanism, DVS2S eludes many generic patterns and irrelevant words in generation, and enjoys efficient decoding at the same time. Experimental results on both automatic metrics and human annotations show that DVS2S can significantly outperform state-of-the-art methods in terms of response quality, but only requires 60% decoding time compared to the most efficient baseline.
Hierarchical Recurrent Attention Network for Response GenerationChen Xing, Wei Wu, Yu Wu et al.
We study multi-turn response generation in chatbots where a response is generated according to a conversation context. Existing work has modeled the hierarchy of the context, but does not pay enough attention to the fact that words and utterances in the context are differentially important. As a result, they may lose important information in context and generate irrelevant responses. We propose a hierarchical recurrent attention network (HRAN) to model both aspects in a unified framework. In HRAN, a hierarchical attention mechanism attends to important parts within and among utterances with word level attention and utterance level attention respectively. With the word level attention, hidden vectors of a word level encoder are synthesized as utterance vectors and fed to an utterance level encoder to construct hidden representations of the context. The hidden vectors of the context are then processed by the utterance level attention and formed as context vectors for decoding the response. Empirical studies on both automatic evaluation and human judgment show that HRAN can significantly outperform state-of-the-art models for multi-turn response generation.
Sequential Matching Network: A New Architecture for Multi-turn Response Selection in Retrieval-based ChatbotsYu Wu, Wei Wu, Chen Xing et al.
We study response selection for multi-turn conversation in retrieval-based chatbots. Existing work either concatenates utterances in context or matches a response with a highly abstract context vector finally, which may lose relationships among utterances or important contextual information. We propose a sequential matching network (SMN) to address both problems. SMN first matches a response with each utterance in the context on multiple levels of granularity, and distills important matching information from each pair as a vector with convolution and pooling operations. The vectors are then accumulated in a chronological order through a recurrent neural network (RNN) which models relationships among utterances. The final matching score is calculated with the hidden states of the RNN. An empirical study on two public data sets shows that SMN can significantly outperform state-of-the-art methods for response selection in multi-turn conversation.
11.6CLNov 2, 2016
Detecting Context Dependent Messages in a Conversational EnvironmentChaozhuo Li, Yu Wu, Wei Wu et al.
While automatic response generation for building chatbot systems has drawn a lot of attention recently, there is limited understanding on when we need to consider the linguistic context of an input text in the generation process. The task is challenging, as messages in a conversational environment are short and informal, and evidence that can indicate a message is context dependent is scarce. After a study of social conversation data crawled from the web, we observed that some characteristics estimated from the responses of messages are discriminative for identifying context dependent messages. With the characteristics as weak supervision, we propose using a Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) network to learn a classifier. Our method carries out text representation and classifier learning in a unified framework. Experimental results show that the proposed method can significantly outperform baseline methods on accuracy of classification.