Qian Cao


2022

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CoCoID: Learning Contrastive Representations and Compact Clusters for Semi-Supervised Intent Discovery
Qian Cao | Deyi Xiong | Qinlong Wang | Xia Peng
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track

Intent discovery is to mine new intents from user utterances, which are not present in the set of manually predefined intents. Previous approaches to intent discovery usually automatically cluster novel intents with prior knowledge from intent-labeled data in a semi-supervised way. In this paper, we focus on the discriminative user utterance representation learning and the compactness of the learned intent clusters. We propose a novel semi-supervised intent discovery framework CoCoID with two essential components: contrastive user utterance representation learning and intra-cluster knowledge distillation. The former attempts to detect similar and dissimilar intents from a minibatch-wise perspective. The latter regularizes the predictive distribution of the model over samples in a cluster-wise way. We conduct experiments on both real-life challenging datasets (i.e., CLINC and BANKING) that are curated to emulate the true environment of commercial/production systems and traditional datasets (i.e., StackOverflow and DBPedia) to evaluate the proposed CoCoID. Experiment results demonstrate that our model substantially outperforms state-of-the-art intent discovery models (12 baselines) by over 1.4 ACC and ARI points and 1.1 NMI points across the four datasets. Further analyses suggest that CoCoID is able to learn contrastive representations and compact clusters for intent discovery.

2020

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RiSAWOZ: A Large-Scale Multi-Domain Wizard-of-Oz Dataset with Rich Semantic Annotations for Task-Oriented Dialogue Modeling
Jun Quan | Shian Zhang | Qian Cao | Zizhong Li | Deyi Xiong
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

In order to alleviate the shortage of multi-domain data and to capture discourse phenomena for task-oriented dialogue modeling, we propose RiSAWOZ, a large-scale multi-domain Chinese Wizard-of-Oz dataset with Rich Semantic Annotations. RiSAWOZ contains 11.2K human-to-human (H2H) multi-turn semantically annotated dialogues, with more than 150K utterances spanning over 12 domains, which is larger than all previous annotated H2H conversational datasets. Both single- and multi-domain dialogues are constructed, accounting for 65% and 35%, respectively. Each dialogue is labeled with comprehensive dialogue annotations, including dialogue goal in the form of natural language description, domain, dialogue states and acts at both the user and system side. In addition to traditional dialogue annotations, we especially provide linguistic annotations on discourse phenomena, e.g., ellipsis and coreference, in dialogues, which are useful for dialogue coreference and ellipsis resolution tasks. Apart from the fully annotated dataset, we also present a detailed description of the data collection procedure, statistics and analysis of the dataset. A series of benchmark models and results are reported, including natural language understanding (intent detection & slot filling), dialogue state tracking and dialogue context-to-text generation, as well as coreference and ellipsis resolution, which facilitate the baseline comparison for future research on this corpus.

2018

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Encoding Gated Translation Memory into Neural Machine Translation
Qian Cao | Deyi Xiong
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Translation memories (TM) facilitate human translators to reuse existing repetitive translation fragments. In this paper, we propose a novel method to combine the strengths of both TM and neural machine translation (NMT) for high-quality translation. We treat the target translation of a TM match as an additional reference input and encode it into NMT with an extra encoder. A gating mechanism is further used to balance the impact of the TM match on the NMT decoder. Experiment results on the UN corpus demonstrate that when fuzzy matches are higher than 50%, the quality of NMT translation can be significantly improved by over 10 BLEU points.