Building an open-domain conversational agent is a challenging problem. Current evaluation methods, mostly post-hoc judgments of static conversation, do not capture conversation quality in a realistic interactive context. In this paper, we investigate interactive human evaluation and provide evidence for its necessity; we then introduce a novel, model-agnostic, and dataset-agnostic method to approximate it. In particular, we propose a self-play scenario where the dialog system talks to itself and we calculate a combination of proxies such as sentiment and semantic coherence on the conversation trajectory. We show that this metric is capable of capturing the human-rated quality of a dialog model better than any automated metric known to-date, achieving a significant Pearson correlation (r >.7, p <.05). To investigate the strengths of this novel metric and interactive evaluation in comparison to state-of-the-art metrics and human evaluation of static conversations, we perform extended experiments with a set of models, including several that make novel improvements to recent hierarchical dialog generation architectures through sentiment and semantic knowledge distillation on the utterance level. Finally, we open-source the interactive evaluation platform we built and the dataset we collected to allow researchers to efficiently deploy and evaluate dialog models.

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

This section provides a comprehensive overview of the CSMV dataset. The CSMV dataset comprises micro videos and their corresponding comments, which have been updated from February 2020 to October 2022. This extensive time range allows for the inclusion of a diverse set of content, capturing the evolution of sentiments over the course of more than two years. In total, the CSMV dataset comprises 8,210 micro videos, totaling approximately 68.83 hours of video duration, along with 107,267 related comments. The CSMV dataset defines two distinct types of labels, opinion and emotion, for analyzing the sentiment expressed in the comments towards the micro videos. By leveraging the combination of video and textual content in this dataset, researchers can examine the interaction between language expressions and visual cues in sentiment analysis. To deepen our understanding of the CSMV dataset, we performed an analysis of the distribution of videos and related comments using specific hashtags. As depicted in Figure 1, this distribution exhibits a rich diversity of topics in video content. This diversity has brought rich expression of sentiment in user comments, giving the CSMV dataset an advantage in comprehending the complexity of induced sentiment. Moreover, this diversity expands the application of the dataset for multimodal sentiment analysis tasks.

Existing video multi-modal sentiment analysis mainly focuses on the sentiment expression of people within the video, yet often neglects the induced sentiment of viewers while watching the videos. Induced sentiment of viewers is essential for inferring the public response to videos and has broad application in analyzing public societal sentiment, effectiveness of advertising and other areas. The micro videos and the related comments provide a rich application scenario for viewers' induced sentiment analysis. In light of this, we introduces a novel research task, Multimodal Sentiment Analysis for Comment Response of Video Induced(MSA-CRVI), aims to infer opinions and emotions according to comments response to micro video. Meanwhile, we manually annotate a dataset named Comment Sentiment toward to Micro Video (CSMV) to support this research. It is the largest video multi-modal sentiment dataset in terms of scale and video duration to our knowledge, containing 107, 267 comments and 8, 210 micro videos with a video duration of 68.83 hours. To infer the induced sentiment of comment should leverage the video content, we propose the Video Content-aware Comment Sentiment Analysis (VC-CSA) method as a baseline to address the challenges inherent in this new task. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method is showing significant improvements over other established baselines.

Deep topic models have been proven as a promising way to extract hierarchical latent representations from documents represented as high-dimensional bag-of-words vectors. However, the representation capability of existing deep topic models is still limited by the phenomenon of "posterior collapse", which has been widely criticized in deep generative models, resulting in the higher-level latent representations exhibiting similar or meaningless patterns. To this end, in this paper, we first develop a novel deep-coupling generative process for existing deep topic models, which incorporates skip connections into the generation of documents, enforcing strong links between the document and its multi-layer latent representations. After that, utilizing data augmentation techniques, we reformulate the deep-coupling generative process as a Markov decision process and develop a corresponding Policy Gradient (PG) based training algorithm, which can further alleviate the information reduction at higher layers. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our developed methods can effectively alleviate "posterior collapse" in deep topic models, contributing to providing higher-quality latent document representations.

We present an optimal transport framework for learning topics from textual data. While the celebrated Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic model and its variants have been applied to many disciplines, they mainly focus on wordoccurrences and neglect to incorporate semantic regularities in language. Even though recent works have tried to exploit the semantic relationship between words to bridge this gap, they, however, these models which are usually extensions of LDA or Dirichlet Multinomial mixture (DMM) are tailored to deal effectively with either regular or short documents. The optimal transport distance provides an appealing tool to incorporate the geometry of word semantics into it. Moreover, recent developments on efficient computation of optimal transport distance also promote its application in topic modeling. In this paper we ground on optimal transport theory to naturally exploit the geometric structures of semantically related words in embedding spaces which leads to more interpretable learned topics. Comprehensive experiments illustrate that the proposed framework outperforms competitive approaches in terms of topic coherence on assorted text corpora which include both long and short documents. The representation of learned topic also leads to better accuracy on classification downstream tasks, which is considered as an extrinsic evaluation.

Topic models have been evolving rapidly over the years, from conventional to recent neural models.

Topic models are becoming increasingly relevant probabilistic models for dimensionality reduction of text data, inferring topics that capture meaningful themes of frequently co-occurring terms. We formulate topic modelling as an information retrieval task, where the goal is, based on the latent topic representation, to capture relevant term co-occurrence patterns. We evaluate performance for this task rigorously with regard to two types of errors, false negatives and positives, based on the well-known precision-recall trade-off and provide a statistical model that allows the user to balance between the contributions of the different error types. When the user focuses solely on the contribution of false negatives ignoring false positives altogether our proposed model reduces to a standard topic model. Extensive experiments demonstrate the proposed approach is effective and infers more coherent topics than existing related approaches.

Turn-level dialogue evaluation models (TDEMs), using self-supervised learning (SSL) framework, have achieved state-of-the-art performance in open-domain dialogue evaluation. However, these models inevitably face two potential problems. First, they have low correlations with humans on medium coherence samples as the SSL framework often brings training data with unbalanced coherence distribution. Second, the SSL framework leads TDEM to nonuniform score distribution. There is a danger that the nonuniform score distribution will weaken the robustness of TDEM through our theoretical analysis.