Clarification requests are a mechanism to help solve communication problems, e.g. due to ambiguity or underspecification, in instruction-following interactions. Despite their importance, even skilful models struggle with producing or interpreting such repair acts. In this work, we test three hypotheses concerning the effects of action taking as an auxiliary task in modelling iCR policies. Contrary to initial expectations, we conclude that its contribution to learning an iCR policy is limited, but some information can still be extracted from prediction uncertainty. We present further evidence that even well-motivated, Transformer-based models fail to learn good policies for when to ask Instruction CRs (iCRs), while the task of determining what to ask about can be more successfully modelled. Considering the implications of these findings, we further discuss the shortcomings of the data-driven paradigm for learning meta-communication acts.

I am broadly interested in evaluation of dialogue systems, in all its many facets: The data they are trained on, their ability to perform a task successfully, their skills with respect to various dialogue phenomena, their resemblance to human cognitive processes, and their ethical and societal impact. More specifically, my research topics focus on understanding the possibilities and limits of current multimodal neural network-based models to incrementally encode information for natural language understanding in general and also for building common ground and asking for clarification. Besides, I am interested in dialogue games as a means to elicit and collect dialogue data and to evaluate the abilities of dialogue models.

Language is by its very nature incremental in how it is produced and processed. This property can be exploited by NLP systems to produce fast responses, which has been shown to be beneficial for real-time interactive applications. Recent neural network-based approaches for incremental processing mainly use RNNs or Transformers. RNNs are fast but monotonic (cannot correct earlier output, which can be necessary in incremental processing). Transformers, on the other hand, consume whole sequences, and hence are by nature non-incremental. A restart-incremental interface that repeatedly passes longer input prefixes can be used to obtain partial outputs, while providing the ability to revise. However, this method becomes costly as the sentence grows longer. In this work, we propose the Two-pass model for AdaPtIve Revision (TAPIR) and introduce a method to obtain an incremental supervision signal for learning an adaptive revision policy. Experimental results on sequence labelling show that our model has better incremental performance and faster inference speed compared to restart-incremental Transformers, while showing little degradation on full sequences.

In NLP, incremental processors produce output in instalments, based on incoming prefixes of the linguistic input. Some tokens trigger revisions, causing edits to the output hypothesis, but little is known about why models revise when they revise. A policy that detects the time steps where revisions should happen can improve efficiency. Still, retrieving a suitable signal to train a revision policy is an open problem, since it is not naturally available in datasets. In this work, we investigate the appropriateness of regressions and skips in human reading eye-tracking data as signals to inform revision policies in incremental sequence labelling. Using generalised mixed-effects models, we find that the probability of regressions and skips by humans can potentially serve as useful predictors for revisions in BiLSTMs and Transformer models, with consistent results for various languages.

Incremental dialogue model components produce a sequence of output prefixes based on incoming input. Mistakes can occur due to local ambiguities or to wrong hypotheses, making the ability to revise past outputs a desirable property that can be governed by a policy. In this work, we formalise and characterise edits and revisions in incremental sequence labelling and propose metrics to evaluate revision policies. We then apply our methodology to profile the incremental behaviour of three Transformer-based encoders in various tasks, paving the road for better revision policies.

Recent work has proposed a methodology for the systematic evaluation of “Situated Language Understanding Agents” — agents that operate in rich linguistic and non-linguistic contexts — through testing them in carefully constructed interactive settings. Other recent work has argued that Large Language Models (LLMs), if suitably set up, can be understood as (simulators of) such agents. A connection suggests itself, which this paper explores: Can LLMs be evaluated meaningfully by exposing them to constrained game-like settings that are built to challenge specific capabilities? As a proof of concept, this paper investigates five interaction settings, showing that current chat-optimised LLMs are, to an extent, capable of following game-play instructions. Both this capability and the quality of the game play, measured by how well the objectives of the different games are met, follows the development cycle, with newer models generally performing better. The metrics even for the comparatively simple example games are far from being saturated, suggesting that the proposed instrument will remain to have diagnostic value.

In visual instruction-following dialogue games, players can engage in repair mechanisms in face of an ambiguous or underspecified instruction that cannot be fully mapped to actions in the world. In this work, we annotate Instruction Clarification Requests (iCRs) in CoDraw, an existing dataset of interactions in a multimodal collaborative dialogue game. We show that it contains lexically and semantically diverse iCRs being produced self-motivatedly by players deciding to clarify in order to solve the task successfully. With 8.8k iCRs found in 9.9k dialogues, CoDraw-iCR (v1) is a large spontaneous iCR corpus, making it a valuable resource for data-driven research on clarification in dialogue. We then formalise and provide baseline models for two tasks: Determining when to make an iCR and how to recognise them, in order to investigate to what extent these tasks are learnable from data.

Cognitively plausible visual dialogue models should keep a mental scoreboard of shared established facts in the dialogue context. We propose a theory-based evaluation method for investigating to what degree models pretrained on the VisDial dataset incrementally build representations that appropriately do scorekeeping. Our conclusion is that the ability to make the distinction between shared and privately known statements along the dialogue is moderately present in the analysed models, but not always incrementally consistent, which may partially be due to the limited need for grounding interactions in the original task.

This report describes the course Evaluation of NLP Systems, taught for Computational Linguistics undergraduate students during the winter semester 20/21 at the University of Potsdam, Germany. It was a discussion-based seminar that covered different aspects of evaluation in NLP, namely paradigms, common procedures, data annotation, metrics and measurements, statistical significance testing, best practices and common approaches in specific NLP tasks and applications.

Incremental processing allows interactive systems to respond based on partial inputs, which is a desirable property e.g. in dialogue agents. The currently popular Transformer architecture inherently processes sequences as a whole, abstracting away the notion of time. Recent work attempts to apply Transformers incrementally via restart-incrementality by repeatedly feeding, to an unchanged model, increasingly longer input prefixes to produce partial outputs. However, this approach is computationally costly and does not scale efficiently for long sequences. In parallel, we witness efforts to make Transformers more efficient, e.g. the Linear Transformer (LT) with a recurrence mechanism. In this work, we examine the feasibility of LT for incremental NLU in English. Our results show that the recurrent LT model has better incremental performance and faster inference speed compared to the standard Transformer and LT with restart-incrementality, at the cost of part of the non-incremental (full sequence) quality. We show that the performance drop can be mitigated by training the model to wait for right context before committing to an output and that training with input prefixes is beneficial for delivering correct partial outputs.

While humans process language incrementally, the best language encoders currently used in NLP do not. Both bidirectional LSTMs and Transformers assume that the sequence that is to be encoded is available in full, to be processed either forwards and backwards (BiLSTMs) or as a whole (Transformers). We investigate how they behave under incremental interfaces, when partial output must be provided based on partial input seen up to a certain time step, which may happen in interactive systems. We test five models on various NLU datasets and compare their performance using three incremental evaluation metrics. The results support the possibility of using bidirectional encoders in incremental mode while retaining most of their non-incremental quality. The “omni-directional” BERT model, which achieves better non-incremental performance, is impacted more by the incremental access. This can be alleviated by adapting the training regime (truncated training), or the testing procedure, by delaying the output until some right context is available or by incorporating hypothetical right contexts generated by a language model like GPT-2.