Reina Akama


2022

pdf bib
Bipartite-play Dialogue Collection for Practical Automatic Evaluation of Dialogue Systems
Shiki Sato | Yosuke Kishinami | Hiroaki Sugiyama | Reina Akama | Ryoko Tokuhisa | Jun Suzuki
Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing: Student Research Workshop

Automation of dialogue system evaluation is a driving force for the efficient development of dialogue systems. This paper introduces the bipartite-play method, a dialogue collection method for automating dialogue system evaluation. It addresses the limitations of existing dialogue collection methods: (i) inability to compare with systems that are not publicly available, and (ii) vulnerability to cheating by intentionally selecting systems to be compared. Experimental results show that the automatic evaluation using the bipartite-play method mitigates these two drawbacks and correlates as strongly with human subjectivity as existing methods.

pdf bib
Target-Guided Open-Domain Conversation Planning
Yosuke Kishinami | Reina Akama | Shiki Sato | Ryoko Tokuhisa | Jun Suzuki | Kentaro Inui
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Prior studies addressing target-oriented conversational tasks lack a crucial notion that has been intensively studied in the context of goal-oriented artificial intelligence agents, namely, planning. In this study, we propose the task of Target-Guided Open-Domain Conversation Planning (TGCP) task to evaluate whether neural conversational agents have goal-oriented conversation planning abilities. Using the TGCP task, we investigate the conversation planning abilities of existing retrieval models and recent strong generative models. The experimental results reveal the challenges facing current technology.

pdf bib
N-best Response-based Analysis of Contradiction-awareness in Neural Response Generation Models
Shiki Sato | Reina Akama | Hiroki Ouchi | Ryoko Tokuhisa | Jun Suzuki | Kentaro Inui
Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue

Avoiding the generation of responses that contradict the preceding context is a significant challenge in dialogue response generation. One feasible method is post-processing, such as filtering out contradicting responses from a resulting n-best response list. In this scenario, the quality of the n-best list considerably affects the occurrence of contradictions because the final response is chosen from this n-best list. This study quantitatively analyzes the contextual contradiction-awareness of neural response generation models using the consistency of the n-best lists. Particularly, we used polar questions as stimulus inputs for concise and quantitative analyses. Our tests illustrate the contradiction-awareness of recent neural response generation models and methodologies, followed by a discussion of their properties and limitations.

2020

pdf bib
Filtering Noisy Dialogue Corpora by Connectivity and Content Relatedness
Reina Akama | Sho Yokoi | Jun Suzuki | Kentaro Inui
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Large-scale dialogue datasets have recently become available for training neural dialogue agents. However, these datasets have been reported to contain a non-negligible number of unacceptable utterance pairs. In this paper, we propose a method for scoring the quality of utterance pairs in terms of their connectivity and relatedness. The proposed scoring method is designed based on findings widely shared in the dialogue and linguistics research communities. We demonstrate that it has a relatively good correlation with the human judgment of dialogue quality. Furthermore, the method is applied to filter out potentially unacceptable utterance pairs from a large-scale noisy dialogue corpus to ensure its quality. We experimentally confirm that training data filtered by the proposed method improves the quality of neural dialogue agents in response generation.

pdf bib
Word Rotator’s Distance
Sho Yokoi | Ryo Takahashi | Reina Akama | Jun Suzuki | Kentaro Inui
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

One key principle for assessing textual similarity is measuring the degree of semantic overlap between texts by considering the word alignment. Such alignment-based approaches are both intuitive and interpretable; however, they are empirically inferior to the simple cosine similarity between general-purpose sentence vectors. We focus on the fact that the norm of word vectors is a good proxy for word importance, and the angle of them is a good proxy for word similarity. However, alignment-based approaches do not distinguish the norm and direction, whereas sentence-vector approaches automatically use the norm as the word importance. Accordingly, we propose decoupling word vectors into their norm and direction then computing the alignment-based similarity with the help of earth mover’s distance (optimal transport), which we refer to as word rotator’s distance. Furthermore, we demonstrate how to grow the norm and direction of word vectors (vector converter); this is a new systematic approach derived from the sentence-vector estimation methods, which can significantly improve the performance of the proposed method. On several STS benchmarks, the proposed methods outperform not only alignment-based approaches but also strong baselines. The source code is avaliable at https://github.com/eumesy/wrd

pdf bib
Evaluating Dialogue Generation Systems via Response Selection
Shiki Sato | Reina Akama | Hiroki Ouchi | Jun Suzuki | Kentaro Inui
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Existing automatic evaluation metrics for open-domain dialogue response generation systems correlate poorly with human evaluation. We focus on evaluating response generation systems via response selection. To evaluate systems properly via response selection, we propose a method to construct response selection test sets with well-chosen false candidates. Specifically, we propose to construct test sets filtering out some types of false candidates: (i) those unrelated to the ground-truth response and (ii) those acceptable as appropriate responses. Through experiments, we demonstrate that evaluating systems via response selection with the test set developed by our method correlates more strongly with human evaluation, compared with widely used automatic evaluation metrics such as BLEU.

2018

pdf bib
Unsupervised Learning of Style-sensitive Word Vectors
Reina Akama | Kento Watanabe | Sho Yokoi | Sosuke Kobayashi | Kentaro Inui
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

This paper presents the first study aimed at capturing stylistic similarity between words in an unsupervised manner. We propose extending the continuous bag of words (CBOW) embedding model (Mikolov et al., 2013b) to learn style-sensitive word vectors using a wider context window under the assumption that the style of all the words in an utterance is consistent. In addition, we introduce a novel task to predict lexical stylistic similarity and to create a benchmark dataset for this task. Our experiment with this dataset supports our assumption and demonstrates that the proposed extensions contribute to the acquisition of style-sensitive word embeddings.

2017

pdf bib
Generating Stylistically Consistent Dialog Responses with Transfer Learning
Reina Akama | Kazuaki Inada | Naoya Inoue | Sosuke Kobayashi | Kentaro Inui
Proceedings of the Eighth International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)

We propose a novel, data-driven, and stylistically consistent dialog response generation system. To create a user-friendly system, it is crucial to make generated responses not only appropriate but also stylistically consistent. For leaning both the properties effectively, our proposed framework has two training stages inspired by transfer learning. First, we train the model to generate appropriate responses, and then we ensure that the responses have a specific style. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method produces stylistically consistent responses while maintaining the appropriateness of the responses learned in a general domain.