Yangjun Zhang

Shuo Jiang, Weifeng Li, Yuping Qian et al.

Various ideation methods, such as morphological analysis and design-by-analogy, have been developed to aid creative problem-solving and innovation. Among them, the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ) stands out as one of the best-known methods. However, the complexity of TRIZ and its reliance on users' knowledge, experience, and reasoning capabilities limit its practicality. To address this, we introduce AutoTRIZ, an artificial ideation system that integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate and enhance the TRIZ methodology. By leveraging LLMs' vast pre-trained knowledge and advanced reasoning capabilities, AutoTRIZ offers a novel, generative, and interpretable approach to engineering innovation. AutoTRIZ takes a problem statement from the user as its initial input, automatically conduct the TRIZ reasoning process and generates a structured solution report. We demonstrate and evaluate the effectiveness of AutoTRIZ through comparative experiments with textbook cases and a real-world application in the design of a Battery Thermal Management System (BTMS). Moreover, the proposed LLM-based framework holds the potential for extension to automate other knowledge-based ideation methods, such as SCAMPER, Design Heuristics, and Design-by-Analogy, paving the way for a new era of AI-driven innovation tools.

Yangjun Zhang, Pengjie Ren, Maarten de Rijke

Conversational interfaces are increasingly popular as a way of connecting people to information. Corpus-based conversational interfaces are able to generate more diverse and natural responses than template-based or retrieval-based agents. With their increased generative capacity of corpusbased conversational agents comes the need to classify and filter out malevolent responses that are inappropriate in terms of content and dialogue acts. Previous studies on the topic of recognizing and classifying inappropriate content are mostly focused on a certain category of malevolence or on single sentences instead of an entire dialogue. In this paper, we define the task of Malevolent Dialogue Response Detection and Classification (MDRDC). We make three contributions to advance research on this task. First, we present a Hierarchical Malevolent Dialogue Taxonomy (HMDT). Second, we create a labelled multi-turn dialogue dataset and formulate the MDRDC task as a hierarchical classification task over this taxonomy. Third, we apply stateof-the-art text classification methods to the MDRDC task and report on extensive experiments aimed at assessing the performance of these approaches.

Yangjun Zhang, Pengjie Ren, Maarten de Rijke

Background Based Conversations (BBCs) have been developed to make dialogue systems generate more informative and natural responses by leveraging background knowledge. Existing methods for BBCs can be grouped into two categories: extraction-based methods and generation-based methods. The former extract spans frombackground material as responses that are not necessarily natural. The latter generate responses thatare natural but not necessarily effective in leveraging background knowledge. In this paper, we focus on generation-based methods and propose a model, namely Context-aware Knowledge Pre-selection (CaKe), which introduces a pre-selection process that uses dynamic bi-directional attention to improve knowledge selection by using the utterance history context as prior information to select the most relevant background material. Experimental results show that our model is superior to current state-of-the-art baselines, indicating that it benefits from the pre-selection process, thus improving in-formativeness and fluency.