An-Zi Yen

Yi-Pei Chen, An-Zi Yen, Hen-Hsen Huang et al.

Lifelogging has gained more attention due to its wide applications, such as personalized recommendations or memory assistance. The issues of collecting and extracting personal life events have emerged. People often share their life experiences with others through conversations. However, extracting life events from conversations is rarely explored. In this paper, we present Life Event Dialog, a dataset containing fine-grained life event annotations on conversational data. In addition, we initiate a novel conversational life event extraction task and differentiate the task from the public event extraction or the life event extraction from other sources like microblogs. We explore three information extraction (IE) frameworks to address the conversational life event extraction task: OpenIE, relation extraction, and event extraction. A comprehensive empirical analysis of the three baselines is established. The results suggest that the current event extraction model still struggles with extracting life events from human daily conversations. Our proposed life event dialog dataset and in-depth analysis of IE frameworks will facilitate future research on life event extraction from conversations.

Yu-Chien Tang, Wei-Yao Wang, An-Zi Yen et al.

The dialogue systems in customer services have been developed with neural models to provide users with precise answers and round-the-clock support in task-oriented conversations by detecting customer intents based on their utterances. Existing intent detection approaches have highly relied on adaptively pre-training language models with large-scale datasets, yet the predominant cost of data collection may hinder their superiority. In addition, they neglect the information within the conversational responses of the agents, which have a lower collection cost, but are significant to customer intent as agents must tailor their replies based on the customers' intent. In this paper, we propose RSVP, a self-supervised framework dedicated to task-oriented dialogues, which utilizes agent responses for pre-training in a two-stage manner. Specifically, we introduce two pre-training tasks to incorporate the relations of utterance-response pairs: 1) Response Retrieval by selecting a correct response from a batch of candidates, and 2) Response Generation by mimicking agents to generate the response to a given utterance. Our benchmark results for two real-world customer service datasets show that RSVP significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines by 4.95% for accuracy, 3.4% for MRR@3, and 2.75% for MRR@5 on average. Extensive case studies are investigated to show the validity of incorporating agent responses into the pre-training stage.

Chia Cheng Chang, An-Zi Yen, Hen-Hsen Huang et al.

Since individuals may struggle to recall all life details and often confuse events, establishing a system to assist users in recalling forgotten experiences is essential. While numerous studies have proposed memory recall systems, these primarily rely on deep learning techniques that require extensive training and often face data scarcity due to the limited availability of personal lifelogs. As lifelogs grow over time, systems must also adapt quickly to newly accumulated data. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various tasks, making them promising for personalized applications. In this work, we present a framework that leverages LLMs for proactive information access, integrating personal knowledge graphs to enhance the detection of access needs through a refined decision-making process. Our framework offers high flexibility, enabling the replacement of base models and the modification of fact retrieval methods for continuous improvement. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach effectively identifies forgotten events, supporting users in recalling past experiences more efficiently.

Yu-Hsiang Liu, Yu-Chien Tang, An-Zi Yen

Training AI agents to proactively assist humans in daily activities, from routine household tasks to urgent safety situations, requires large-scale visual data. However, capturing such scenarios in the real world is often difficult, costly, or unsafe, and physics-based simulators lack the visual fidelity needed to transfer learned behaviors to real settings. Therefore, we introduce VISTA, a video synthesis system that produces high-fidelity egocentric videos as training and evaluation data for AI agents. VISTA employs a 5-step script generation pipeline with causal reverse reasoning to create diverse, logically grounded intervention modes. These scenarios span two levels of agent autonomy: reactive and proactive. In reactive modes, the user explicitly asks the agent for help. In proactive modes, the agent offers help without receiving a direct request. We further divide proactive modes into explicit and implicit types. In explicit proactive scenarios, the user is aware of needing help but does not directly address the agent. In implicit proactive scenarios, the agent intervenes before the user even realizes that help is needed. VISTA allows users to customize and refine scenarios to generate video benchmarks for daily tasks, offering a scalable and controllable alternative to real-world data collection for training and evaluating AI agents in realistic environments.

Wei-Yu Kao, An-Zi Yen

Automated fact-checking is a crucial task in the governance of internet content. Although various studies utilize advanced models to tackle this issue, a significant gap persists in addressing complex real-world rumors and deceptive claims. To address this challenge, this paper explores the novel task of flaw-oriented fact-checking, including aspect generation and flaw identification. We also introduce RefuteClaim, a new framework designed specifically for this task. Given the absence of an existing dataset, we present FlawCheck, a dataset created by extracting and transforming insights from expert reviews into relevant aspects and identified flaws. The experimental results underscore the efficacy of RefuteClaim, particularly in classifying and elucidating false claims.

Yu-Cheng Liu, An-Zi Yen

Vocabulary acquisition is essential to second language learning, as it underpins all core language skills. Accurate vocabulary assessment is particularly important in standardized exams, where test items evaluate learners' comprehension and contextual use of words. Previous research has explored methods for generating distractors to aid in the design of English vocabulary tests. However, current approaches often rely on lexical databases or predefined rules, and frequently produce distractors that risk invalidating the question by introducing multiple correct options. In this study, we focus on English vocabulary questions from Taiwan's university entrance exams. We analyze student response distributions to gain insights into the characteristics of these test items and provide a reference for future research. Additionally, we identify key limitations in how large language models (LLMs) support teachers in generating distractors for vocabulary test design. To address these challenges, we propose the iterative selection with self-review (ISSR) framework, which makes use of a novel LLM-based self-review mechanism to ensure that the distractors remain valid while offering diverse options. Experimental results show that ISSR achieves promising performance in generating plausible distractors, and the self-review mechanism effectively filters out distractors that could invalidate the question.

Ke-Ching Chang, Chung-Chi Chen, An-Zi Yen

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant capabilities in machine translation. However, their translation quality is sometimes questioned, as the generated outputs may deviate from expressions typically used by native speakers. These deviations often arise from differences in sentence structure between language systems. To address this issue, we propose ParaAlign Translator, a method that fine-tunes LLMs to paraphrase sentences, aligning their structures with those of the target language systems. This approach improves the performance of subsequent translations. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method enhances the LLaMA-3-8B model's performance in both resource-rich and low-resource scenarios and achieves parity with or surpassing the much larger LLaMA-3-70B model.

Yong-En Tian, Yu-Chien Tang, An-Zi Yen et al.

Aspect-based summarization has attracted significant attention for its ability to generate more fine-grained and user-aligned summaries. While most existing approaches assume a set of predefined aspects as input, real-world scenarios often present challenges where these given aspects may be incomplete, irrelevant, or entirely missing from the document. Users frequently expect systems to adaptively refine or filter the provided aspects based on the actual content. In this paper, we initiate this novel task setting, termed Content-Aware Refinement of Provided Aspects for Summarization (CARPAS), with the aim of dynamically adjusting the provided aspects based on the document context before summarizing. We construct three new datasets to facilitate our pilot experiments, and by using LLMs with four representative prompting strategies in this task, we find that LLMs tend to predict an overly comprehensive set of aspects, which often results in excessively long and misaligned summaries. Building on this observation, we propose a preliminary subtask to predict the number of relevant aspects, and demonstrate that the predicted number can serve as effective guidance for the LLMs, reducing the inference difficulty, and enabling them to focus on the most pertinent aspects. Our extensive experiments show that the proposed approach significantly improves performance across all datasets. Moreover, our deeper analyses uncover LLMs' compliance when the requested number of aspects differs from their own estimations, establishing a crucial insight for the deployment of LLMs in similar real-world applications.

Yu-Fei Shih, An-Zi Yen, Hen-Hsen Huang et al.

People often struggle to remember specific details of past experiences, which can lead to the need to revisit these memories. Consequently, lifelog retrieval has emerged as a crucial application. Various studies have explored methods to facilitate rapid access to personal lifelogs for memory recall assistance. In this paper, we propose a Captioning-Integrated Visual Lifelog (CIVIL) Retrieval System for extracting specific images from a user's visual lifelog based on textual queries. Unlike traditional embedding-based methods, our system first generates captions for visual lifelogs and then utilizes a text embedding model to project both the captions and user queries into a shared vector space. Visual lifelogs, captured through wearable cameras, provide a first-person viewpoint, necessitating the interpretation of the activities of the individual behind the camera rather than merely describing the scene. To address this, we introduce three distinct approaches: the single caption method, the collective caption method, and the merged caption method, each designed to interpret the life experiences of lifeloggers. Experimental results show that our method effectively describes first-person visual images, enhancing the outcomes of lifelog retrieval. Furthermore, we construct a textual dataset that converts visual lifelogs into captions, thereby reconstructing personal life experiences.

Bo-Wei Chen, An-Zi Yen, Chung-Chi Chen

Legal writing demands clarity, formality, and domain-specific precision-qualities often lacking in documents authored by individuals without legal training. To bridge this gap, this paper explores the task of legal text refinement that transforms informal, conversational inputs into persuasive legal arguments. We introduce FinDR, a Chinese dataset of financial dispute records, annotated with official judgments on claim reasonableness. Our proposed method, Multi-Scale Model Interaction (MSMI), leverages a lightweight classifier to evaluate outputs and guide iterative refinement by Large Language Models (LLMs). Experimental results demonstrate that MSMI significantly outperforms single-pass prompting strategies. Additionally, we validate the generalizability of MSMI on several short-text benchmarks, showing improved adversarial robustness. Our findings reveal the potential of multi-model collaboration for enhancing legal document generation and broader text refinement tasks.

Wei-Lin Chen, An-Zi Yen, Cheng-Kuang Wu et al.

Language models (LMs) that jointly generate end-task answers as well as free-text rationales are known as self-rationalization models. Recent works demonstrate great performance gain for self-rationalization by few-shot prompting LMs with rationale-augmented exemplars. However, the ability to benefit from explanations only emerges with large-scale LMs, which have poor accessibility. In this work, we explore the less-studied setting of leveraging explanations for small LMs to improve few-shot self-rationalization. We first revisit the relationship between rationales and answers. Inspired by the implicit mental process of how human beings assess explanations, we present a novel approach, Zero-shot Augmentation of Rationale-Answer pairs (ZARA), to automatically construct pseudo-parallel data for self-training by reducing the problem of plausibility judgement to natural language inference. Experimental results show ZARA achieves SOTA performance on the FEB benchmark, for both the task accuracy and the explanation metric. In addition, we conduct human and quantitative evaluation validating ZARA's ability to automatically identify plausible and accurate rationale-answer pairs.

An-Zi Yen, Hen-Hsen Huang, Hsin-Hsi Chen

With the advance of science and technology, people are used to record their daily life events via writing blogs, uploading social media posts, taking photos, or filming videos. Such rich repository personal information is useful for supporting human living assistance. The main challenge is how to store and manage personal knowledge from various sources. In this position paper, we propose a research agenda on mining personal knowledge from various sources of lifelogs, personal knowledge base construction, and information recall for assisting people to recall their experiences.