Dialogue segmentation is a crucial task for dialogue systems allowing a better understanding of conversational texts. Despite recent progress in unsupervised dialogue segmentation methods, their performances are limited by the lack of explicit supervised signals for training. Furthermore, the precise definition of segmentation points in conversations still remains as a challenging problem, increasing the difficulty of collecting manual annotations. In this paper, we provide a feasible definition of dialogue segmentation points with the help of document-grounded dialogues and release a large-scale supervised dataset called SuperDialseg, containing 9,478 dialogues based on two prevalent document-grounded dialogue corpora, and also inherit their useful dialogue-related annotations. Moreover, we provide a benchmark including 18 models across five categories for the dialogue segmentation task with several proper evaluation metrics. Empirical studies show that supervised learning is extremely effective in in-domain datasets and models trained on SuperDialseg can achieve good generalization ability on out-of-domain data. Additionally, we also conducted human verification on the test set and the Kappa score confirmed the quality of our automatically constructed dataset. We believe our work is an important step forward in the field of dialogue segmentation.

Aspect sentiment quad prediction (ASQP) analyzes the aspect terms, opinion terms, sentiment polarity, and aspect categories in a text. One challenge in this task is the scarcity of data owing to the high annotation cost. Data augmentation techniques are commonly used to address this issue. However, existing approaches simply rewrite texts in the training data, restricting the semantic diversity of the generated data and impairing the quality due to the inconsistency between text and quads. To address these limitations, we augment quads and train a quads-to-text model to generate corresponding texts. Furthermore, we designed novel strategies to filter out low-quality data and balance the sample difficulty distribution of the augmented dataset. Empirical studies on two ASQP datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms other data augmentation methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance on the benchmarks. The source code will be released upon acceptance.

In this paper, we introduce the task of learning unsupervised dialogue embeddings.Trivial approaches such as combining pre-trained word or sentence embeddings and encoding through pre-trained language models (PLMs) have been shown to be feasible for this task. However, these approaches typically ignore the conversational interactions between interlocutors, resulting in poor performance. To address this issue, we proposed a self-guided contrastive learning approach named dial2vec.Dial2vec considers a dialogue as an information exchange process. It captures the interaction patterns between interlocutors and leverages them to guide the learning of the embeddings corresponding to each interlocutor. Then the dialogue embedding is obtained by an aggregation of the embeddings from all interlocutors. To verify our approach, we establish a comprehensive benchmark consisting of six widely-used dialogue datasets. We consider three evaluation tasks: domain categorization, semantic relatedness, and dialogue retrieval. Dial2vec achieves on average 8.7, 9.0, and 13.8 points absolute improvements in terms of purity, Spearman’s correlation, and mean average precision (MAP) over the strongest baseline on the three tasks respectively. Further analysis shows that dial2vec obtains informative and discriminative embeddings for both interlocutors under the guidance of the conversational interactions and achieves the best performance when aggregating them through the interlocutor-level pooling strategy. All codes and data are publicly available at https://github.com/AlibabaResearch/DAMO-ConvAI/tree/main/dial2vec.

Target-oriented opinion words extraction (TOWE) is a subtask of aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA). It aims to extract the corresponding opinion words for a given opinion target in a review sentence. Intuitively, the relation between an opinion target and an opinion word mostly relies on syntactics. In this study, we design a directed syntactic dependency graph based on a dependency tree to establish a path from the target to candidate opinions. Subsequently, we propose a novel attention-based relational graph convolutional neural network (ARGCN) to exploit syntactic information over dependency graphs. Moreover, to explicitly extract the corresponding opinion words toward the given opinion target, we effectively encode target information in our model with the target-aware representation. Empirical results demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms all of the existing models on four benchmark datasets. Extensive analysis also demonstrates the effectiveness of each component of our models. Our code is available at https://github.com/wcwowwwww/towe-eacl.