Hannes Schulz


2019

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The KnowRef Coreference Corpus: Removing Gender and Number Cues for Difficult Pronominal Anaphora Resolution
Ali Emami | Paul Trichelair | Adam Trischler | Kaheer Suleman | Hannes Schulz | Jackie Chi Kit Cheung
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

We introduce a new benchmark for coreference resolution and NLI, KnowRef, that targets common-sense understanding and world knowledge. Previous coreference resolution tasks can largely be solved by exploiting the number and gender of the antecedents, or have been handcrafted and do not reflect the diversity of naturally occurring text. We present a corpus of over 8,000 annotated text passages with ambiguous pronominal anaphora. These instances are both challenging and realistic. We show that various coreference systems, whether rule-based, feature-rich, or neural, perform significantly worse on the task than humans, who display high inter-annotator agreement. To explain this performance gap, we show empirically that state-of-the art models often fail to capture context, instead relying on the gender or number of candidate antecedents to make a decision. We then use problem-specific insights to propose a data-augmentation trick called antecedent switching to alleviate this tendency in models. Finally, we show that antecedent switching yields promising results on other tasks as well: we use it to achieve state-of-the-art results on the GAP coreference task.

2017

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A Frame Tracking Model for Memory-Enhanced Dialogue Systems
Hannes Schulz | Jeremie Zumer | Layla El Asri | Shikhar Sharma
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP

Recently, resources and tasks were proposed to go beyond state tracking in dialogue systems. An example is the frame tracking task, which requires recording multiple frames, one for each user goal set during the dialogue. This allows a user, for instance, to compare items corresponding to different goals. This paper proposes a model which takes as input the list of frames created so far during the dialogue, the current user utterance as well as the dialogue acts, slot types, and slot values associated with this utterance. The model then outputs the frame being referenced by each triple of dialogue act, slot type, and slot value. We show that on the recently published Frames dataset, this model significantly outperforms a previously proposed rule-based baseline. In addition, we propose an extensive analysis of the frame tracking task by dividing it into sub-tasks and assessing their difficulty with respect to our model.

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Frames: a corpus for adding memory to goal-oriented dialogue systems
Layla El Asri | Hannes Schulz | Shikhar Sharma | Jeremie Zumer | Justin Harris | Emery Fine | Rahul Mehrotra | Kaheer Suleman
Proceedings of the 18th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue

This paper proposes a new dataset, Frames, composed of 1369 human-human dialogues with an average of 15 turns per dialogue. This corpus contains goal-oriented dialogues between users who are given some constraints to book a trip and assistants who search a database to find appropriate trips. The users exhibit complex decision-making behaviour which involve comparing trips, exploring different options, and selecting among the trips that were discussed during the dialogue. To drive research on dialogue systems towards handling such behaviour, we have annotated and released the dataset and we propose in this paper a task called frame tracking. This task consists of keeping track of different semantic frames throughout each dialogue. We propose a rule-based baseline and analyse the frame tracking task through this baseline.

2016

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Policy Networks with Two-Stage Training for Dialogue Systems
Mehdi Fatemi | Layla El Asri | Hannes Schulz | Jing He | Kaheer Suleman
Proceedings of the 17th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue