Ingrid Zukerman


2024

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Let’s Negotiate! A Survey of Negotiation Dialogue Systems
Haolan Zhan | Yufei Wang | Zhuang Li | Tao Feng | Yuncheng Hua | Suraj Sharma | Lizhen Qu | Zhaleh Semnani Azad | Ingrid Zukerman | Reza Haf
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2024

Negotiation is a crucial ability in human communication. Recently, there has been a resurgent research interest in negotiation dialogue systems, whose goal is to create intelligent agents that can assist people in resolving conflicts or reaching agreements. Although there have been many explorations into negotiation dialogue systems, a systematic review of this task has not been performed to date. We aim to fill this gap by investigating recent studies in the field of negotiation dialogue systems, and covering benchmarks, evaluations and methodologies within the literature. We also discuss potential future directions, including multi-modal, multi-party and cross-cultural negotiation scenarios. Our goal is to provide the community with a systematic overview of negotiation dialogue systems and to inspire future research.

2023

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Turning Flowchart into Dialog: Augmenting Flowchart-grounded Troubleshooting Dialogs via Synthetic Data Generation
Haolan Zhan | Sameen Maruf | Lizhen Qu | Yufei Wang | Ingrid Zukerman | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the 21st Annual Workshop of the Australasian Language Technology Association

Flowchart-grounded troubleshooting dialogue (FTD) systems, which follow the instructions of a flowchart to diagnose users’ problems in specific domains (e.g., vehicle, laptop), have been gaining research interest in recent years. However, collecting sufficient dialogues that are naturally grounded on flowcharts is costly, thus FTD systems are impeded by scarce training data. To mitigate the data sparsity issue, we propose a plan-based synthetic data generation (PlanSDG) approach that generates diverse synthetic dialog data at scale by transforming concise flowchart into dialogues. Specifically, its generative model employs a variational-base framework with a hierarchical planning strategy that includes global and local latent planning variables. Experiments on the FloDial dataset show that synthetic dialogue produced by PlanSDG improves the performance of downstream tasks, including flowchart path retrieval and response generation, in particular on the Out-of-Flowchart settings. In addition, further analysis demonstrate the quality of synthetic data generated by PlanSDG in paths that are covered by current sample dialogues and paths that are not covered.

2021

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Explaining Decision-Tree Predictions by Addressing Potential Conflicts between Predictions and Plausible Expectations
Sameen Maruf | Ingrid Zukerman | Ehud Reiter | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Natural Language Generation

We offer an approach to explain Decision Tree (DT) predictions by addressing potential conflicts between aspects of these predictions and plausible expectations licensed by background information. We define four types of conflicts, operationalize their identification, and specify explanatory schemas that address them. Our human evaluation focused on the effect of explanations on users’ understanding of a DT’s reasoning and their willingness to act on its predictions. The results show that (1) explanations that address potential conflicts are considered at least as good as baseline explanations that just follow a DT path; and (2) the conflict-based explanations are deemed especially valuable when users’ expectations disagree with the DT’s predictions.

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Lifelong Explainer for Lifelong Learners
Xuelin Situ | Sameen Maruf | Ingrid Zukerman | Cecile Paris | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Lifelong Learning (LL) black-box models are dynamic in that they keep learning from new tasks and constantly update their parameters. Owing to the need to utilize information from previously seen tasks, and capture commonalities in potentially diverse data, it is hard for automatic explanation methods to explain the outcomes of these models. In addition, existing explanation methods, e.g., LIME, which are computationally expensive when explaining a static black-box model, are even more inefficient in the LL setting. In this paper, we propose a novel Lifelong Explanation (LLE) approach that continuously trains a student explainer under the supervision of a teacher – an arbitrary explanation algorithm – on different tasks undertaken in LL. We also leverage the Experience Replay (ER) mechanism to prevent catastrophic forgetting in the student explainer. Our experiments comparing LLE to three baselines on text classification tasks show that LLE can enhance the stability of the explanations for all seen tasks and maintain the same level of faithfulness to the black-box model as the teacher, while being up to 10ˆ2 times faster at test time. Our ablation study shows that the ER mechanism in our LLE approach enhances the learning capabilities of the student explainer. Our code is available at https://github.com/situsnow/LLE.

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Learning to Explain: Generating Stable Explanations Fast
Xuelin Situ | Ingrid Zukerman | Cecile Paris | Sameen Maruf | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

The importance of explaining the outcome of a machine learning model, especially a black-box model, is widely acknowledged. Recent approaches explain an outcome by identifying the contributions of input features to this outcome. In environments involving large black-box models or complex inputs, this leads to computationally demanding algorithms. Further, these algorithms often suffer from low stability, with explanations varying significantly across similar examples. In this paper, we propose a Learning to Explain (L2E) approach that learns the behaviour of an underlying explanation algorithm simultaneously from all training examples. Once the explanation algorithm is distilled into an explainer network, it can be used to explain new instances. Our experiments on three classification tasks, which compare our approach to six explanation algorithms, show that L2E is between 5 and 7.5×10ˆ4 times faster than these algorithms, while generating more stable explanations, and having comparable faithfulness to the black-box model.

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Curriculum Learning Effectively Improves Low Data VQA
Narjes Askarian | Ehsan Abbasnejad | Ingrid Zukerman | Wray Buntine | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the 19th Annual Workshop of the Australasian Language Technology Association

Visual question answering (VQA) models, in particular modular ones, are commonly trained on large-scale datasets to achieve state-of-the-art performance. However, such datasets are sometimes not available. Further, it has been shown that training these models on small datasets significantly reduces their accuracy. In this paper, we propose curriculum-based learning (CL) regime to increase the accuracy of VQA models trained on small datasets. Specifically, we offer three criteria to rank the samples in these datasets and propose a training strategy for each criterion. Our results show that, for small datasets, our CL approach yields more accurate results than those obtained when training with no curriculum.

2019

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Proceedings of the 20th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue
Satoshi Nakamura | Milica Gasic | Ingrid Zukerman | Gabriel Skantze | Mikio Nakano | Alexandros Papangelis | Stefan Ultes | Koichiro Yoshino
Proceedings of the 20th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue

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Influence of Time and Risk on Response Acceptability in a Simple Spoken Dialogue System
Andisheh Partovi | Ingrid Zukerman
Proceedings of the 20th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue

We describe a longitudinal user study conducted in the context of a Spoken Dialogue System for a household robot, where we examined the influence of time displacement and situational risk on users’ preferred responses. To this effect, we employed a corpus of spoken requests that asked a robot to fetch or move objects in a room. In the first stage of our study, participants selected among four response types to these requests under two risk conditions: low and high. After some time, the same participants rated several responses to the previous requests — these responses were instantiated from the four response types. Our results show that participants did not rate highly their own response types; moreover, they rated their own response types similarly to different ones. This suggests that, at least in this context, people’s preferences at a particular point in time may not reflect their general attitudes, and that various reasonable response types may be equally acceptable. Our study also reveals that situational risk influences the acceptability of some response types.

2018

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Exploring Textual and Speech information in Dialogue Act Classification with Speaker Domain Adaptation
Xuanli He | Quan Tran | William Havard | Laurent Besacier | Ingrid Zukerman | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the Australasian Language Technology Association Workshop 2018

In spite of the recent success of Dialogue Act (DA) classification, the majority of prior works focus on text-based classification with oracle transcriptions, i.e. human transcriptions, instead of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)’s transcriptions. In spoken dialog systems, however, the agent would only have access to noisy ASR transcriptions, which may further suffer performance degradation due to domain shift. In this paper, we explore the effectiveness of using both acoustic and textual signals, either oracle or ASR transcriptions, and investigate speaker domain adaptation for DA classification. Our multimodal model proves to be superior to the unimodal models, particularly when the oracle transcriptions are not available. We also propose an effective method for speaker domain adaptation, which achieves competitive results.

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The Context-Dependent Additive Recurrent Neural Net
Quan Hung Tran | Tuan Lai | Gholamreza Haffari | Ingrid Zukerman | Trung Bui | Hung Bui
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers)

Contextual sequence mapping is one of the fundamental problems in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Here, instead of relying solely on the information presented in the text, the learning agents have access to a strong external signal given to assist the learning process. In this paper, we propose a novel family of Recurrent Neural Network unit: the Context-dependent Additive Recurrent Neural Network (CARNN) that is designed specifically to address this type of problem. The experimental results on public datasets in the dialog problem (Babi dialog Task 6 and Frame), contextual language model (Switchboard and Penn Tree Bank) and question answering (Trec QA) show that our novel CARNN-based architectures outperform previous methods.

2017

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A Generative Attentional Neural Network Model for Dialogue Act Classification
Quan Hung Tran | Gholamreza Haffari | Ingrid Zukerman
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

We propose a novel generative neural network architecture for Dialogue Act classification. Building upon the Recurrent Neural Network framework, our model incorporates a novel attentional technique and a label to label connection for sequence learning, akin to Hidden Markov Models. The experiments show that both of these innovations lead our model to outperform strong baselines for dialogue act classification on MapTask and Switchboard corpora. We further empirically analyse the effectiveness of each of the new innovations.

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Preserving Distributional Information in Dialogue Act Classification
Quan Hung Tran | Ingrid Zukerman | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

This paper introduces a novel training/decoding strategy for sequence labeling. Instead of greedily choosing a label at each time step, and using it for the next prediction, we retain the probability distribution over the current label, and pass this distribution to the next prediction. This approach allows us to avoid the effect of label bias and error propagation in sequence learning/decoding. Our experiments on dialogue act classification demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach. Even though our underlying neural network model is relatively simple, it outperforms more complex neural models, achieving state-of-the-art results on the MapTask and Switchboard corpora.

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A Hierarchical Neural Model for Learning Sequences of Dialogue Acts
Quan Hung Tran | Ingrid Zukerman | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 1, Long Papers

We propose a novel hierarchical Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) for learning sequences of Dialogue Acts (DAs). The input in this task is a sequence of utterances (i.e., conversational contributions) comprising a sequence of tokens, and the output is a sequence of DA labels (one label per utterance). Our model leverages the hierarchical nature of dialogue data by using two nested RNNs that capture long-range dependencies at the dialogue level and the utterance level. This model is combined with an attention mechanism that focuses on salient tokens in utterances. Our experimental results show that our model outperforms strong baselines on two popular datasets, Switchboard and MapTask; and our detailed empirical analysis highlights the impact of each aspect of our model.

2016

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A Corpus of Tables in Full-Text Biomedical Research Publications
Tatyana Shmanina | Ingrid Zukerman | Ai Lee Cheam | Thomas Bochynek | Lawrence Cavedon
Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Building and Evaluating Resources for Biomedical Text Mining (BioTxtM2016)

The development of text mining techniques for biomedical research literature has received increased attention in recent times. However, most of these techniques focus on prose, while much important biomedical data reside in tables. In this paper, we present a corpus created to serve as a gold standard for the development and evaluation of techniques for the automatic extraction of information from biomedical tables. We describe the guidelines used for corpus annotation and the manner in which they were developed. The high inter-annotator agreement achieved on the corpus, and the generic nature of our annotation approach, suggest that the developed guidelines can serve as a general framework for table annotation in biomedical and other scientific domains. The annotated corpus and the guidelines are available at http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/research/umnl/data/index.shtml.

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Inter-document Contextual Language model
Quan Hung Tran | Ingrid Zukerman | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the 2016 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

2014

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Authorship Attribution with Topic Models
Yanir Seroussi | Ingrid Zukerman | Fabian Bohnert
Computational Linguistics, Volume 40, Issue 2 - June 2014

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A Comparative Study of Weighting Schemes for the Interpretation of Spoken Referring Expressions
Su Nam Kim | Ingrid Zukerman | Thomas Kleinbauer | Masud Moshtaghi
Proceedings of the Australasian Language Technology Association Workshop 2014

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Challenges in Information Extraction from Tables in Biomedical Research Publications: a Dataset Analysis
Tatyana Shmanina | Lawrence Cavedon | Ingrid Zukerman
Proceedings of the Australasian Language Technology Association Workshop 2014

2013

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Evaluation of the Scusi? Spoken Language Interpretation System – A Case Study
Thomas Kleinbauer | Ingrid Zukerman | Su Nam Kim
Proceedings of the Sixth International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing

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A Noisy Channel Approach to Error Correction in Spoken Referring Expressions
Su Nam Kim | Ingrid Zukerman | Thomas Kleinbauer | Farshid Zavareh
Proceedings of the Sixth International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing

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Impact of Corpus Diversity and Complexity on NER Performance
Tatyana Shmanina | Ingrid Zukerman | Antonio Jimeno Yepes | Lawrence Cavedon | Karin Verspoor
Proceedings of the Australasian Language Technology Association Workshop 2013 (ALTA 2013)

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Error Detection in Automatic Speech Recognition
Farshid Zavareh | Ingrid Zukerman | Su Nam Kim | Thomas Kleinbauer
Proceedings of the Australasian Language Technology Association Workshop 2013 (ALTA 2013)

2012

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Authorship Attribution with Author-aware Topic Models
Yanir Seroussi | Fabian Bohnert | Ingrid Zukerman
Proceedings of the 50th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

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Experimental Evaluation of a Lexicon- and Corpus-based Ensemble for Multi-way Sentiment Analysis
Minh Duc Cao | Ingrid Zukerman
Proceedings of the Australasian Language Technology Association Workshop 2012

2011

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In Situ Text Summarisation for Museum Visitors
Timothy Baldwin | Patrick Ye | Fabian Bohnert | Ingrid Zukerman
Proceedings of the 25th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation

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Authorship Attribution with Latent Dirichlet Allocation
Yanir Seroussi | Ingrid Zukerman | Fabian Bohnert
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning

2010

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A Hierarchical Classifier Applied to Multi-way Sentiment Detection
Adrian Bickerstaffe | Ingrid Zukerman
Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics (Coling 2010)

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Interpreting Pointing Gestures and Spoken Requests – A Probabilistic, Salience-based Approach
Ingrid Zukerman | Gideon Kowadlo | Patrick Ye
Coling 2010: Posters

2009

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Towards the Interpretation of Utterance Sequences in a Dialogue System
Ingrid Zukerman | Patrick Ye | Kapil Kumar Gupta | Enes Makalic
Proceedings of the SIGDIAL 2009 Conference

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An Empirical Study of Corpus-Based Response Automation Methods for an E-mail-Based Help-Desk Domain
Yuval Marom | Ingrid Zukerman
Computational Linguistics, Volume 35, Number 4, December 2009

2006

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Proceedings of the Australasian Language Technology Workshop 2006
Lawrence Cavedon | Ingrid Zukerman
Proceedings of the Australasian Language Technology Workshop 2006

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Automating Help-desk Responses: A Comparative Study of Information-gathering Approaches
Yuval Marom | Ingrid Zukerman
Proceedings of the Workshop on Task-Focused Summarization and Question Answering

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Balancing Conflicting Factors in Argument Interpretation
Ingrid Zukerman | Michael Niemann | Sarah George
Proceedings of the 7th SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue

2005

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Book Review: Argumentation Machines: New Frontiers in Argumentation and Computation, edited by Chris Reed and Timothy J. Norman
Ingrid Zukerman
Computational Linguistics, Volume 31, Number 1, March 2005

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Exploring and Exploiting the Limited Utility of Captions in Recognizing Intention in Information Graphics
Stephanie Elzer | Sandra Carberry | Daniel Chester | Seniz Demir | Nancy Green | Ingrid Zukerman | Keith Trnka
Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL’05)

2004

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Filtering Speaker-Specific Words from Electronic Discussions
Ingrid Zukerman | Yuval Marom
COLING 2004: Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

2003

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Lexical Paraphrasing for Document Retrieval and Node Identification
Ingrid Zukerman | Sarah George | Yingying Wen
Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Paraphrasing

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An Information-theoretic Approach for Argument Interpretation
Sarah George | Ingrid Zukerman
Proceedings of the Fourth SIGdial Workshop of Discourse and Dialogue

2002

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Towards a Noise-Tolerant, Representation-Independent Mechanism for Argument Interpretation
Ingrid Zukerman | Sarah George
COLING 2002: The 19th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

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Lexical Query Paraphrasing for Document Retrieval
Ingrid Zukerman | Bhavani Raskutti
COLING 2002: The 19th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

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A Minimum Message Length Approach for Argument Interpretation
Ingrid Zukerman | Sarah George
Proceedings of the Third SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue

2001

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Using Machine Learning Techniques to Interpret WH-questions
Ingrid Zukerman | Eric Horvitz
Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

2000

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Towards the Generation of Rebuttals in a Bayesian Argumentation System
Nathalie Jitnah | Ingrid Zukerman | Richard McConachy | Sarah George
INLG’2000 Proceedings of the First International Conference on Natural Language Generation

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Using Argumentation Strategies in Automated Argument Generation
Ingrid Zukerman | Richard McConachy | Sarah George
INLG’2000 Proceedings of the First International Conference on Natural Language Generation

1998

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A Bayesian Approach to Automating Argumentation
Richard McConachy | Kevin B. Korb | Ingrid Zukerman
New Methods in Language Processing and Computational Natural Language Learning

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Extracting Phoneme Pronunciation Information from Corpora
Ian Thomas | Ingrid Zukerman | Bhavani Raskutti
New Methods in Language Processing and Computational Natural Language Learning

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Attention During Argument Generation and Presentation
Ingrid Zukerman | Richard McConachy | Kevin B. Korb
Natural Language Generation

1994

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Discourse Planning as an Optimization Process
Ingrid Zukerman | Richard McConachy
Proceedings of the Seventh International Workshop on Natural Language Generation

1991

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Current Research in Natural Language Generation
Ingrid Zukerman
Computational Linguistics, Volume 17, Number 3, September 1991

1990

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Generating Peripheral Rhetorical Devices by Consulting a User Model
Ingrid Zukerman
Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Natural Language Generation