Recent neural-based aspect-based sentiment analysis approaches, though achieving promising improvement on benchmark datasets, have reported suffering from poor robustness when encountering confounder such as non-target aspects. In this paper, we take a causal view to addressing this issue. We propose a simple yet effective method, namely, Sentiment Adjustment Figure 1: The causal graph of ABSA. We build our (SENTA), by applying a backdoor adjustment causal model over three main variables: target feature to disentangle those confounding factors. X, predictions Y and confounding factor C. Experimental results on the Aspect Robustness Our goal is to alleviate confounding factors, which is Test Set (ARTS) dataset demonstrate caused by X C, Y C. that our approach improves the performance while maintaining accuracy in the original test set

Topic models have been successfully used for analyzing text documents. However, with existing topic models, many documents are required for training. In this paper, we propose a neural network-based few-shot learning method that can learn a topic model from just a few documents. The neural networks in our model take a small number of documents as inputs, and output topic model priors. The proposed method trains the neural networks such that the expected test likelihood is improved when topic model parameters are estimated by maximizing the posterior probability using the priors based on the EM algorithm. Since each step in the EM algorithm is differentiable, the proposed method can backpropagate the loss through the EM algorithm to train the neural networks. The expected test likelihood is maximized by a stochastic gradient descent method using a set of multiple text corpora with an episodic training framework. In our experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed method achieves better perplexity than existing methods using three real-world text document sets.

In Clarifications are crucial to robust dialogues, and Sections 4 and A we test the practical implications pragmatic factors -- notably those shaped by the of our recipe by identifying and characterizing (according world modalities situating the conversation -- have to their modalities) the clarifications in a a key role to play. Referring expressions have in corpus of long dialogues in English. In Section 5 vision a modality in which to ground clarifications we turn to the claim that clarifications are rare in concerning objects in the world (de Vries et al., dialogue datasets (Ginzburg, 2012), and that current 2017); navigation instructions have in movement data-hungry algorithms cannot learn them. We a modality in which to ground clarifications concerning argue that whether they are rare or not depends collaborative wayfinding (Thomason et al., on pragmatic factors of the conversation and the 2019). Clarifications grounded in situationally relevant modality of the grounded clarification, and discuss modalities boost the redundancy required to the impact of six such factors. After presenting learn to use language without explicit supervision, potential objections and our responses in Section 6, as they make explicit the process of negotiating the we conclude in Section 7 by noting ethical issues communicative intent. But despite its importance, raised by socioperceptive dialogue systems that work on clarification remains scattered.

Sentiment analysis is an important task in natural language processing (NLP). Most of existing state-of-the-art methods are under the supervised learning paradigm. However, human annotations can be scarce. Thus, we should leverage more weak supervision for sentiment analysis. In this paper, we propose a posterior regularization framework for the variational approach to the weakly supervised sentiment analysis to better control the posterior distribution of the label assignment. The intuition behind the posterior regularization is that if extracted opinion words from two documents are semantically similar, the posterior distributions of two documents should be similar. Our experimental results show that the posterior regularization can improve the original variational approach to the weakly supervised sentiment analysis and the performance is more stable with smaller prediction variance.

We present a new corpus for the Situated and Interactive Multimodal Conversations, SIMMC 2.0, aimed at building a successful multimodal assistant agent. Specifically, the dataset features 11K task-oriented dialogs (117K utterances) between a user and a virtual assistant on the shopping domain (fashion and furniture), grounded in situated and photo-realistic VR scenes. The dialogs are collected using a two-phase pipeline, which first generates simulated dialog flows via a novel multimodal dialog simulator we propose, followed by manual paraphrasing of the generated utterances. In this paper, we provide an in-depth analysis of the collected dataset, and describe in detail the four main benchmark tasks we propose for SIMMC 2.0. The preliminary analysis with a baseline model highlights the new challenges that the SIMMC 2.0 dataset brings, suggesting new directions for future research. Our dataset and code will be made publicly available.

It is important for sociable recommendation dialog systems to perform as both on-task content and social content to engage users and gain their favor. In addition to understand the user preferences and provide a satisfying recommendation, such systems must be able to generate coherent and natural social conversations to the user. Traditional dialog state tracking cannot be applied to such systems because it does not track the attributes in the social content. To address this challenge, we propose DEUX, a novel attribute-guided framework to create better user experiences while accomplishing a movie recommendation task. DEUX has a module that keeps track of the movie attributes (e.g., favorite genres, actors,etc.) in both user utterances and system responses. This allows the system to introduce new movie attributes in its social content. Then, DEUX has multiple values for the same attribute type which suits the recommendation task since a user may like multiple genres, for instance. Experiments suggest that DEUX outperforms all the baselines on being more consistent, fitting the user preferences better, and providing a more engaging chat experience. Our approach can be used for any similar problems of sociable task-oriented dialog system.

Topic modeling algorithms traditionally model topics as list of weighted terms. These topic models can be used effectively to classify texts or to support text mining tasks such as text summarization or fact extraction. The general procedure relies on statistical analysis of term frequencies. The focus of this work is on the implementation of the knowledge-based topic modelling services in a KNIME workflow. A brief description and evaluation of the DBPedia-based enrichment approach and the comparative evaluation of enriched topic models will be outlined based on our previous work. DBpedia-Spotlight is used to identify entities in the input text and information from DBpedia is used to extend these entities. We provide a workflow developed in KNIME implementing this approach and perform a result comparison of topic modeling supported by knowledge base information to traditional LDA. This topic modeling approach allows semantic interpretation both by algorithms and by humans.

Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MuSe) 2021 is a challenge focusing on the tasks of sentiment and emotion, as well as physiological-emotion and emotion-based stress recognition through more comprehensively integrating the audio-visual, language, and biological signal modalities. The purpose of MuSe 2021 is to bring together communities from different disciplines; mainly, the audio-visual emotion recognition community (signal-based), the sentiment analysis community (symbol-based), and the health informatics community. We present four distinct sub-challenges: MuSe-Wilder and MuSe-Stress which focus on continuous emotion (valence and arousal) prediction; MuSe-Sent, in which participants recognise five classes each for valence and arousal; and MuSe-Physio, in which the novel aspect of `physiological-emotion' is to be predicted. For this years' challenge, we utilise the MuSe-CaR dataset focusing on user-generated reviews and introduce the Ulm-TSST dataset, which displays people in stressful depositions. This paper also provides detail on the state-of-the-art feature sets extracted from these datasets for utilisation by our baseline model, a Long Short-Term Memory-Recurrent Neural Network. For each sub-challenge, a competitive baseline for participants is set; namely, on test, we report a Concordance Correlation Coefficient (CCC) of .4616 CCC for MuSe-Wilder; .4717 CCC for MuSe-Stress, and .4606 CCC for MuSe-Physio. For MuSe-Sent an F1 score of 32.82 % is obtained.

Speech processing research is at a high right now, with virtual assistants like Alexa, Siri, Google and others always listening and willing to help. But without a keen eye -- or ear -- for who this technology aims to assist, interest could wane, said Maxine Eskenazi, a Carnegie Mellon University researcher in the School of Computer Science who has worked on speech processing and spoken dialogue systems for decades. "We need to stop focusing on the agent and start focusing on the user," Eskenazi said. "It's only a dialogue if there are two individuals participating. If we make systems that are just fun for us to make but do not serve the user and do not help the user, then they'll stop using Alexa or Google."

Semantic role labeling (SRL) aims to extract the arguments for each predicate in an input sentence. Traditional SRL can fail to analyze dialogues because it only works on every single sentence, while ellipsis and anaphora frequently occur in dialogues. To address this problem, we propose the conversational SRL task, where an argument can be the dialogue participants, a phrase in the dialogue history or the current sentence. As the existing SRL datasets are in the sentence level, we manually annotate semantic roles for 3,000 chit-chat dialogues (27,198 sentences) to boost the research in this direction. Experiments show that while traditional SRL systems (even with the help of coreference resolution or rewriting) perform poorly for analyzing dialogues, modeling dialogue histories and participants greatly helps the performance, indicating that adapting SRL to conversations is very promising for universal dialogue understanding. Our initial study by applying CSRL to two mainstream conversational tasks, dialogue response generation and dialogue context rewriting, also confirms the usefulness of CSRL.