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 jason weston


Retrieval-Augmented Generationfor Knowledge-Intensive NLPTasks

Neural Information Processing Systems

This 14th century work is divided into 3 sections: "Inferno", "Purgatorio" & "Paradiso" (y) Barack Obama was born in Hawaii.(x) Define "middle ear"(x) Question Answering: Question Query The middle ear includes the tympanic cavity and the three ossicles.



A Large Collection of Model-generated Contradictory Responses for Consistency-aware Dialogue Systems

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Mitigating the generation of contradictory responses poses a substantial challenge in dialogue response generation. The quality and quantity of available contradictory response data play a vital role in suppressing these contradictions, offering two significant benefits. First, having access to large contradiction data enables a comprehensive examination of their characteristics. Second, data-driven methods to mitigate contradictions may be enhanced with large-scale contradiction data for training. Nevertheless, no attempt has been made to build an extensive collection of model-generated contradictory responses. In this paper, we build a large dataset of response generation models' contradictions for the first time. Then, we acquire valuable insights into the characteristics of model-generated contradictions through an extensive analysis of the collected responses. Lastly, we also demonstrate how this dataset substantially enhances the performance of data-driven contradiction suppression methods.


Learning to love diligent trolls: Accounting for rater effects in the dialogue safety task

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Chatbots have the risk of generating offensive utterances, which must be avoided. Post-deployment, one way for a chatbot to continuously improve is to source utterance/label pairs from feedback by live users. However, among users are trolls, who provide training examples with incorrect labels. To de-troll training data, previous work removed training examples that have high user-aggregated cross-validation (CV) error. However, CV is expensive; and in a coordinated attack, CV may be overwhelmed by trolls in number and in consistency among themselves. In the present work, I address both limitations by proposing a solution inspired by methodology in automated essay scoring (AES): have multiple users rate each utterance, then perform latent class analysis (LCA) to infer correct labels. As it does not require GPU computations, LCA is inexpensive. In experiments, I found that the AES-like solution can infer training labels with high accuracy when trolls are consistent, even when trolls are the majority.


Hexa: Self-Improving for Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue System

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

A common practice in knowledge-grounded dialogue generation is to explicitly utilize intermediate steps (e.g., web-search, memory retrieval) with modular approaches. However, data for such steps are often inaccessible compared to those of dialogue responses as they are unobservable in an ordinary dialogue. To fill in the absence of these data, we develop a self-improving method to improve the generative performances of intermediate steps without the ground truth data. In particular, we propose a novel bootstrapping scheme with a guided prompt and a modified loss function to enhance the diversity of appropriate self-generated responses. Through experiments on various benchmark datasets, we empirically demonstrate that our method successfully leverages a self-improving mechanism in generating intermediate and final responses and improves the performances on the task of knowledge-grounded dialogue generation. Along with the progress of Language Model (LM) pretraining, open-domain dialogue models have evolved to leverage the advantage of the transformer architecture's generalization ability (Zhang et al., 2019; Freitas et al., 2020; Roller et al., 2021; Xu et al., 2022a; Shuster et al., 2022b; Thoppilan et al., 2022). While model scaling also improves the dialogue quality (Freitas et al., 2020) as seen in large LMs, relying on sole LMs casts limitations such as hallucination and the lack of faithfulness by outdated training data (Brown et al., 2020; Thoppilan et al., 2022; Chowdhery et al., 2022). In order to overcome the limitations, prior works have adopted a modular design where multiple modules generate intermediate texts (e.g., to retrieve documents) before the final response (Lewis et al., 2020; Adolphs et al., 2021; Zhang et al., 2021; Shuster et al., 2022a). Among them, Komeili et al. (2022); Shuster et al. (2022b) have shown promising results in dialogue generation. Specifically, they adopted a modular design to integrate external knowledge (e.g., internet) and internal knowledge (e.g., memory) in dialogue models. For example, in Komeili et al. (2022), a LM first decides whether to access a knowledge in a form of text generation. Upon deciding to access knowledge, the LM generates an appropriate query for knowledge retrieval from external sources such as search engines. Then, the LM generates a response based on extracted knowledge from the accessed data. See Figure 2 of Appendix A for an illustrative example. Regarding each intermediate phase as a separate module, a convenient method of training these modules would be to apply supervised learning on each module using individual datasets (Dinan et al., 2019; Shuster et al., 2022a; Glass et al., 2022; Shuster et al., 2022b).


PK-ICR: Persona-Knowledge Interactive Context Retrieval for Grounded Dialogue

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Identifying relevant persona or knowledge for conversational systems is critical to grounded dialogue response generation. However, each grounding has been mostly researched in isolation with more practical multi-context dialogue tasks introduced in recent works. We define Persona and Knowledge Dual Context Identification as the task to identify persona and knowledge jointly for a given dialogue, which could be of elevated importance in complex multi-context dialogue settings. We develop a novel grounding retrieval method that utilizes all contexts of dialogue simultaneously. Our method requires less computational power via utilizing neural QA retrieval models. We further introduce our novel null-positive rank test which measures ranking performance on semantically dissimilar samples (i.e. hard negatives) in relation to data augmentation.


No Offense Taken: Eliciting Offensiveness from Language Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This work was completed in May 2022. For safe and reliable deployment of language models in the real world, testing needs to be robust. This robustness can be characterized by the difficulty and diversity of the test cases we evaluate these models on. Limitations in human-in-the-loop test case generation has prompted an advent of automated test case generation approaches. In particular, we focus on Red Teaming Language Models with Language Models by Perez et al.(2022). Our contributions include developing a pipeline for automated test case generation via red teaming that leverages publicly available smaller language models (LMs), experimenting with different target LMs and red classifiers, and generating a corpus of test cases that can help in eliciting offensive responses from widely deployed LMs and identifying their failure modes.


How Can Context Help? Exploring Joint Retrieval of Passage and Personalized Context

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The integration of external personalized context information into document-grounded conversational systems has significant potential business value, but has not been well-studied. Motivated by the concept of personalized context-aware document-grounded conversational systems, we introduce the task of context-aware passage retrieval. We also construct a dataset specifically curated for this purpose. We describe multiple baseline systems to address this task, and propose a novel approach, Personalized Context-Aware Search (PCAS), that effectively harnesses contextual information during passage retrieval. Experimental evaluations conducted on multiple popular dense retrieval systems demonstrate that our proposed approach not only outperforms the baselines in retrieving the most relevant passage but also excels at identifying the pertinent context among all the available contexts. We envision that our contributions will serve as a catalyst for inspiring future research endeavors in this promising direction.


Don't Forget Your ABC's: Evaluating the State-of-the-Art in Chat-Oriented Dialogue Systems

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Despite tremendous advancements in dialogue systems, stable evaluation still requires human judgments producing notoriously high-variance metrics due to their inherent subjectivity. Moreover, methods and labels in dialogue evaluation are not fully standardized, especially for open-domain chats, with a lack of work to compare and assess the validity of those approaches. The use of inconsistent evaluation can misinform the performance of a dialogue system, which becomes a major hurdle to enhance it. Thus, a dimensional evaluation of chat-oriented open-domain dialogue systems that reliably measures several aspects of dialogue capabilities is desired. This paper presents a novel human evaluation method to estimate the rates of many dialogue system behaviors. Our method is used to evaluate four state-of-the-art open-domain dialogue systems and compared with existing approaches. The analysis demonstrates that our behavior method is more suitable than alternative Likert-style or comparative approaches for dimensional evaluation of these systems.


System-Level Natural Language Feedback

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Natural language (NL) feedback contains rich information about the user experience. Existing studies focus on an instance-level approach, where feedback is used to refine specific examples, disregarding its system-wide application. This paper proposes a general framework for unlocking the system-level use of NL feedback. We show how to use feedback to formalize system-level design decisions in a human-in-the-loop-process -- in order to produce better models. In particular this is done through: (i) metric design for tasks; and (ii) language model prompt design for refining model responses. We conduct two case studies of this approach for improving search query generation and dialog response generation, demonstrating the effectiveness of the use of system-level feedback. We show the combination of system-level feedback and instance-level feedback brings further gains, and that human written instance-level feedback results in more grounded refinements than GPT-3.5 written ones, underlying the importance of human feedback for building systems.