Reducing Sensitivity on Speaker Names for Text Generation from Dialogues

Qi Jia, Haifeng Tang, Kenny Zhu


Abstract
Changing speaker names consistently throughout a dialogue should not affect its meaning and corresponding outputs for text generation from dialogues. However, pre-trained language models, serving as the backbone for dialogue-processing tasks, have shown to be sensitive to nuances. This may result in unfairness in real-world applications. No comprehensive analysis of this problem has been done in the past. In this work, we propose to quantitatively measure a model’s sensitivity on speaker names, and comprehensively evaluate a number of known methods for reducing speaker name sensitivity, including a novel approach of our own. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets provide a benchmark for this problem and show the favorable performance of our approach in sensitivity reduction and quality of generation.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-acl.129
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2058–2073
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.129
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.129
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Qi Jia, Haifeng Tang, and Kenny Zhu. 2023. Reducing Sensitivity on Speaker Names for Text Generation from Dialogues. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023, pages 2058–2073, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Reducing Sensitivity on Speaker Names for Text Generation from Dialogues (Jia et al., Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.129.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.129.mp4