Paul A. Crook

Also published as: Paul Crook


2022

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KETOD: Knowledge-Enriched Task-Oriented Dialogue
Zhiyu Chen | Bing Liu | Seungwhan Moon | Chinnadhurai Sankar | Paul Crook | William Yang Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022

Existing studies in dialogue system research mostly treat task-oriented dialogue and chit-chat as separate domains. Towards building a human-like assistant that can converse naturally and seamlessly with users, it is important to build a dialogue system that conducts both types of conversations effectively. In this work, we investigate how task-oriented dialogue and knowledge-grounded chit-chat can be effectively integrated into a single model. To this end, we create a new dataset, KETOD (Knowledge-Enriched Task-Oriented Dialogue), where we naturally enrich task-oriented dialogues with chit-chat based on relevant entity knowledge. We also propose two new models, SimpleToDPlus and Combiner, for the proposed task. Experimental results on both automatic and human evaluations show that the proposed methods can significantly improve the performance in knowledge-enriched response generation while maintaining a competitive task-oriented dialog performance. We believe our new dataset will be a valuable resource for future studies. Our dataset and code are publicly available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/ketod.

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Database Search Results Disambiguation for Task-Oriented Dialog Systems
Kun Qian | Satwik Kottur | Ahmad Beirami | Shahin Shayandeh | Paul Crook | Alborz Geramifard | Zhou Yu | Chinnadhurai Sankar
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

As task-oriented dialog systems are becoming increasingly popular in our lives, more realistic tasks have been proposed and explored. However, new practical challenges arise. For instance, current dialog systems cannot effectively handle multiplesearch results when querying a database, due to the lack of such scenarios in existing public datasets. In this paper, we propose Database Search Result (DSR) Disambiguation, a novel task that focuses on disambiguating database search results, which enhances user experience by allowing them to choose from multiple options instead of just one. To study this task, we augment the popular task-oriented dialog datasets (MultiWOZ and SGD) with turns that resolve ambiguities by (a) synthetically generating turns through a pre-defined grammar, and (b) collecting human paraphrases for a subset. We find that training on our augmented dialog data improves the model’s ability to deal with ambiguous scenarios, without sacrificing performance on unmodified turns. Furthermore, pre-fine tuning and multi-task learning help our model to improve performance on DSR-disambiguation even in the absence of in-domain data, suggesting that it can be learned as a universal dialog skill. Our data and code will be made publicly available.

2021

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Continual Learning in Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems
Andrea Madotto | Zhaojiang Lin | Zhenpeng Zhou | Seungwhan Moon | Paul Crook | Bing Liu | Zhou Yu | Eunjoon Cho | Pascale Fung | Zhiguang Wang
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Continual learning in task-oriented dialogue systems allows the system to add new domains and functionalities overtime after deployment, without incurring the high cost of retraining the whole system each time. In this paper, we propose a first-ever continual learning benchmark for task-oriented dialogue systems with 37 domains to be learned continuously in both modularized and end-to-end learning settings. In addition, we implement and compare multiple existing continual learning baselines, and we propose a simple yet effective architectural method based on residual adapters. We also suggest that the upper bound performance of continual learning should be equivalent to multitask learning when data from all domain is available at once. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed architectural method and a simple replay-based strategy perform better, by a large margin, compared to other continuous learning techniques, and only slightly worse than the multitask learning upper bound while being 20X faster in learning new domains. We also report several trade-offs in terms of parameter usage, memory size and training time, which are important in the design of a task-oriented dialogue system. The proposed benchmark is released to promote more research in this direction.

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Zero-Shot Dialogue State Tracking via Cross-Task Transfer
Zhaojiang Lin | Bing Liu | Andrea Madotto | Seungwhan Moon | Zhenpeng Zhou | Paul Crook | Zhiguang Wang | Zhou Yu | Eunjoon Cho | Rajen Subba | Pascale Fung
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Zero-shot transfer learning for dialogue state tracking (DST) enables us to handle a variety of task-oriented dialogue domains without the expense of collecting in-domain data. In this work, we propose to transfer the cross-task knowledge from general question answering (QA) corpora for the zero-shot DST task. Specifically, we propose TransferQA, a transferable generative QA model that seamlessly combines extractive QA and multi-choice QA via a text-to-text transformer framework, and tracks both categorical slots and non-categorical slots in DST. In addition, we introduce two effective ways to construct unanswerable questions, namely, negative question sampling and context truncation, which enable our model to handle none value slots in the zero-shot DST setting. The extensive experiments show that our approaches substantially improve the existing zero-shot and few-shot results on MultiWoz. Moreover, compared to the fully trained baseline on the Schema-Guided Dialogue dataset, our approach shows better generalization ability in unseen domains.

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An Analysis of State-of-the-Art Models for Situated Interactive MultiModal Conversations (SIMMC)
Satwik Kottur | Paul Crook | Seungwhan Moon | Ahmad Beirami | Eunjoon Cho | Rajen Subba | Alborz Geramifard
Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue

There is a growing interest in virtual assistants with multimodal capabilities, e.g., inferring the context of a conversation through scene understanding. The recently released situated and interactive multimodal conversations (SIMMC) dataset addresses this trend by enabling research to create virtual assistants, which are capable of taking into account the scene that user sees when conversing with the user and also interacting with items in the scene. The SIMMC dataset is novel in that it contains fully annotated user-assistant, task-orientated dialogs where the user and an assistant co-observe the same visual elements and the latter can take actions to update the scene. The SIMMC challenge, held as part of theNinth Dialog System Technology Challenge(DSTC9), propelled the development of various models which together set a new state-of-the-art on the SIMMC dataset. In this work, we compare and analyze these models to identify‘what worked?’, and the remaining gaps;‘whatnext?’. Our analysis shows that even though pretrained language models adapted to this set-ting show great promise, there are indications that multimodal context isn’t fully utilised, and there is a need for better and scalable knowledge base integration. We hope this first-of-its-kind analysis for SIMMC models provides useful insights and opportunities for further research in multimodal conversational agents

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Adding Chit-Chat to Enhance Task-Oriented Dialogues
Kai Sun | Seungwhan Moon | Paul Crook | Stephen Roller | Becka Silvert | Bing Liu | Zhiguang Wang | Honglei Liu | Eunjoon Cho | Claire Cardie
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Existing dialogue corpora and models are typically designed under two disjoint motives: while task-oriented systems focus on achieving functional goals (e.g., booking hotels), open-domain chatbots aim at making socially engaging conversations. In this work, we propose to integrate both types of systems by Adding Chit-Chat to ENhance Task-ORiented dialogues (ACCENTOR), with the goal of making virtual assistant conversations more engaging and interactive. Specifically, we propose a Human <-> AI collaborative data collection approach for generating diverse chit-chat responses to augment task-oriented dialogues with minimal annotation effort. We then present our new chit-chat-based annotations to 23.8K dialogues from two popular task-oriented datasets (Schema-Guided Dialogue and MultiWOZ 2.1) and demonstrate their advantage over the originals via human evaluation. Lastly, we propose three new models for adding chit-chat to task-oriented dialogues, explicitly trained to predict user goals and to generate contextually relevant chit-chat responses. Automatic and human evaluations show that, compared with the state-of-the-art task-oriented baseline, our models can code-switch between task and chit-chat to be more engaging, interesting, knowledgeable, and humanlike, while maintaining competitive task performance.

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Leveraging Slot Descriptions for Zero-Shot Cross-Domain Dialogue StateTracking
Zhaojiang Lin | Bing Liu | Seungwhan Moon | Paul Crook | Zhenpeng Zhou | Zhiguang Wang | Zhou Yu | Andrea Madotto | Eunjoon Cho | Rajen Subba
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Zero-shot cross-domain dialogue state tracking (DST) enables us to handle unseen domains without the expense of collecting in-domain data. In this paper, we propose a slot descriptions enhanced generative approach for zero-shot cross-domain DST. Specifically, our model first encodes a dialogue context and a slot with a pre-trained self-attentive encoder, and generates slot value in auto-regressive manner. In addition, we incorporate Slot Type Informed Descriptions that capture the shared information of different slots to facilitates the cross-domain knowledge transfer. Experimental results on MultiWOZ shows that our model significantly improve existing state-of-the-art results in zero-shot cross-domain setting.

2020

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Information Seeking in the Spirit of Learning: A Dataset for Conversational Curiosity
Pedro Rodriguez | Paul Crook | Seungwhan Moon | Zhiguang Wang
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Open-ended human learning and information-seeking are increasingly mediated by digital assistants. However, such systems often ignore the user’s pre-existing knowledge. Assuming a correlation between engagement and user responses such as “liking” messages or asking followup questions, we design a Wizard-of-Oz dialog task that tests the hypothesis that engagement increases when users are presented with facts related to what they know. Through crowd-sourcing of this experiment, we collect and release 14K dialogs (181K utterances) where users and assistants converse about geographic topics like geopolitical entities and locations. This dataset is annotated with pre-existing user knowledge, message-level dialog acts, grounding to Wikipedia, and user reactions to messages. Responses using a user’s prior knowledge increase engagement. We incorporate this knowledge into a multi-task model that reproduces human assistant policies and improves over a bert content model by 13 mean reciprocal rank points.

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Situated and Interactive Multimodal Conversations
Seungwhan Moon | Satwik Kottur | Paul Crook | Ankita De | Shivani Poddar | Theodore Levin | David Whitney | Daniel Difranco | Ahmad Beirami | Eunjoon Cho | Rajen Subba | Alborz Geramifard
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Next generation virtual assistants are envisioned to handle multimodal inputs (e.g., vision, memories of previous interactions, and the user’s utterances), and perform multimodal actions (, displaying a route while generating the system’s utterance). We introduce Situated Interactive MultiModal Conversations (SIMMC) as a new direction aimed at training agents that take multimodal actions grounded in a co-evolving multimodal input context in addition to the dialog history. We provide two SIMMC datasets totalling ~13K human-human dialogs (~169K utterances) collected using a multimodal Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ) setup, on two shopping domains: (a) furniture – grounded in a shared virtual environment; and (b) fashion – grounded in an evolving set of images. Datasets include multimodal context of the items appearing in each scene, and contextual NLU, NLG and coreference annotations using a novel and unified framework of SIMMC conversational acts for both user and assistant utterances. Finally, we present several tasks within SIMMC as objective evaluation protocols, such as structural API prediction, response generation, and dialog state tracking. We benchmark a collection of existing models on these SIMMC tasks as strong baselines, and demonstrate rich multimodal conversational interactions. Our data, annotations, and models will be made publicly available.

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Resource Constrained Dialog Policy Learning Via Differentiable Inductive Logic Programming
Zhenpeng Zhou | Ahmad Beirami | Paul Crook | Pararth Shah | Rajen Subba | Alborz Geramifard
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Motivated by the needs of resource constrained dialog policy learning, we introduce dialog policy via differentiable inductive logic (DILOG). We explore the tasks of one-shot learning and zero-shot domain transfer with DILOG on SimDial and MultiWoZ. Using a single representative dialog from the restaurant domain, we train DILOG on the SimDial dataset and obtain 99+% in-domain test accuracy. We also show that the trained DILOG zero-shot transfers to all other domains with 99+% accuracy, proving the suitability of DILOG to slot-filling dialogs. We further extend our study to the MultiWoZ dataset achieving 90+% inform and success metrics. We also observe that these metrics are not capturing some of the shortcomings of DILOG in terms of false positives, prompting us to measure an auxiliary Action F1 score. We show that DILOG is 100x more data efficient than state-of-the-art neural approaches on MultiWoZ while achieving similar performance metrics. We conclude with a discussion on the strengths and weaknesses of DILOG.

2019

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Recommendation as a Communication Game: Self-Supervised Bot-Play for Goal-oriented Dialogue
Dongyeop Kang | Anusha Balakrishnan | Pararth Shah | Paul Crook | Y-Lan Boureau | Jason Weston
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Traditional recommendation systems produce static rather than interactive recommendations invariant to a user’s specific requests, clarifications, or current mood, and can suffer from the cold-start problem if their tastes are unknown. These issues can be alleviated by treating recommendation as an interactive dialogue task instead, where an expert recommender can sequentially ask about someone’s preferences, react to their requests, and recommend more appropriate items. In this work, we collect a goal-driven recommendation dialogue dataset (GoRecDial), which consists of 9,125 dialogue games and 81,260 conversation turns between pairs of human workers recommending movies to each other. The task is specifically designed as a cooperative game between two players working towards a quantifiable common goal. We leverage the dataset to develop an end-to-end dialogue system that can simultaneously converse and recommend. Models are first trained to imitate the behavior of human players without considering the task goal itself (supervised training). We then finetune our models on simulated bot-bot conversations between two paired pre-trained models (bot-play), in order to achieve the dialogue goal. Our experiments show that models finetuned with bot-play learn improved dialogue strategies, reach the dialogue goal more often when paired with a human, and are rated as more consistent by humans compared to models trained without bot-play. The dataset and code are publicly available through the ParlAI framework.

2016

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Task Completion Platform: A self-serve multi-domain goal oriented dialogue platform
Paul Crook | Alex Marin | Vipul Agarwal | Khushboo Aggarwal | Tasos Anastasakos | Ravi Bikkula | Daniel Boies | Asli Celikyilmaz | Senthilkumar Chandramohan | Zhaleh Feizollahi | Roman Holenstein | Minwoo Jeong | Omar Khan | Young-Bum Kim | Elizabeth Krawczyk | Xiaohu Liu | Danko Panic | Vasiliy Radostev | Nikhil Ramesh | Jean-Phillipe Robichaud | Alexandre Rochette | Logan Stromberg | Ruhi Sarikaya
Proceedings of the 2016 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Demonstrations

2012

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A Statistical Spoken Dialogue System using Complex User Goals and Value Directed Compression
Paul A. Crook | Zhuoran Wang | Xingkun Liu | Oliver Lemon
Proceedings of the Demonstrations at the 13th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

2010

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Representing Uncertainty about Complex User Goals in Statistical Dialogue Systems
Paul A. Crook | Oliver Lemon
Proceedings of the SIGDIAL 2010 Conference