Sang-Woo Lee


2023

pdf bib
Pivotal Role of Language Modeling in Recommender Systems: Enriching Task-specific and Task-agnostic Representation Learning
Kyuyong Shin | Hanock Kwak | Wonjae Kim | Jisu Jeong | Seungjae Jung | Kyungmin Kim | Jung-Woo Ha | Sang-Woo Lee
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Recent studies have proposed unified user modeling frameworks that leverage user behavior data from various applications. Many of them benefit from utilizing users’ behavior sequences as plain texts, representing rich information in any domain or system without losing generality. Hence, a question arises: Can language modeling for user history corpus help improve recommender systems? While its versatile usability has been widely investigated in many domains, its applications to recommender systems still remain underexplored. We show that language modeling applied directly to task-specific user histories achieves excellent results on diverse recommendation tasks. Also, leveraging additional task-agnostic user histories delivers significant performance benefits. We further demonstrate that our approach can provide promising transfer learning capabilities for a broad spectrum of real-world recommender systems, even on unseen domains and services.

pdf bib
Query-Efficient Black-Box Red Teaming via Bayesian Optimization
Deokjae Lee | JunYeong Lee | Jung-Woo Ha | Jin-Hwa Kim | Sang-Woo Lee | Hwaran Lee | Hyun Oh Song
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

The deployment of large-scale generative models is often restricted by their potential risk of causing harm to users in unpredictable ways. We focus on the problem of black-box red teaming, where a red team generates test cases and interacts with the victim model to discover a diverse set of failures with limited query access. Existing red teaming methods construct test cases based on human supervision or language model (LM) and query all test cases in a brute-force manner without incorporating any information from past evaluations, resulting in a prohibitively large number of queries. To this end, we propose Bayesian red teaming (BRT), novel query-efficient black-box red teaming methods based on Bayesian optimization, which iteratively identify diverse positive test cases leading to model failures by utilizing the pre-defined user input pool and the past evaluations. Experimental results on various user input pools demonstrate that our method consistently finds a significantly larger number of diverse positive test cases under the limited query budget than the baseline methods.The source code is available at https://github.com/snu-mllab/Bayesian-Red-Teaming.

pdf bib
Universal Domain Adaptation for Robust Handling of Distributional Shifts in NLP
Hyuhng Kim | Hyunsoo Cho | Sang-Woo Lee | Junyeob Kim | Choonghyun Park | Sang-goo Lee | Kang Yoo | Taeuk Kim
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

When deploying machine learning systems to the wild, it is highly desirable for them to effectively leverage prior knowledge to the unfamiliar domain while also firing alarms to anomalous inputs. In order to address these requirements, Universal Domain Adaptation (UniDA) has emerged as a novel research area in computer vision, focusing on achieving both adaptation ability and robustness (i.e., the ability to detect out-of-distribution samples). While UniDA has led significant progress in computer vision, its application on language input still needs to be explored despite its feasibility. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive benchmark for natural language that offers thorough viewpoints of the model’s generalizability and robustness. Our benchmark encompasses multiple datasets with varying difficulty levels and characteristics, including temporal shifts and diverse domains. On top of our testbed, we validate existing UniDA methods from computer vision and state-of-the-art domain adaptation techniques from NLP literature, yielding valuable findings: We observe that UniDA methods originally designed for image input can be effectively transferred to the natural language domain while also underscoring the effect of adaptation difficulty in determining the model’s performance.

pdf bib
Asking Clarification Questions to Handle Ambiguity in Open-Domain QA
Dongryeol Lee | Segwang Kim | Minwoo Lee | Hwanhee Lee | Joonsuk Park | Sang-Woo Lee | Kyomin Jung
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Ambiguous questions persist in open-domain question answering, because formulating a precise question with a unique answer is often challenging. Previous works have tackled this issue by asking disambiguated questions for all possible interpretations of the ambiguous question. Instead, we propose to ask a clarification question, where the user’s response will help identify the interpretation that best aligns with the user’s intention. We first present CAmbigNQ, a dataset consisting of 5,653 ambiguous questions, each with relevant passages, possible answers, and a clarification question. The clarification questions were efficiently created by generating them using InstructGPT and manually revising them as necessary. We then define a pipeline of three tasks—(1) ambiguity detection, (2) clarification question generation, and (3) clarification-based QA. In the process, we adopt or design appropriate evaluation metrics to facilitate sound research. Lastly, we achieve F1 of 61.3, 25.1, and 40.5 on the three tasks, demonstrating the need for further improvements while providing competitive baselines for future work.

2022

pdf bib
Building a Role Specified Open-Domain Dialogue System Leveraging Large-Scale Language Models
Sanghwan Bae | Donghyun Kwak | Sungdong Kim | Donghoon Ham | Soyoung Kang | Sang-Woo Lee | Woomyoung Park
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Recent open-domain dialogue models have brought numerous breakthroughs. However, building a chat system is not scalable since it often requires a considerable volume of human-human dialogue data, especially when enforcing features such as persona, style, or safety. In this work, we study the challenge of imposing roles on open-domain dialogue systems, with the goal of making the systems maintain consistent roles while conversing naturally with humans. To accomplish this, the system must satisfy a role specification that includes certain conditions on the stated features as well as a system policy on whether or not certain types of utterances are allowed. For this, we propose an efficient data collection framework leveraging in-context few-shot learning of large-scale language models for building role-satisfying dialogue dataset from scratch. We then compare various architectures for open-domain dialogue systems in terms of meeting role specifications while maintaining conversational abilities. Automatic and human evaluations show that our models return few out-of-bounds utterances, keeping competitive performance on general metrics. We release a Korean dialogue dataset we built for further research.

pdf bib
On the Effect of Pretraining Corpora on In-context Learning by a Large-scale Language Model
Seongjin Shin | Sang-Woo Lee | Hwijeen Ahn | Sungdong Kim | HyoungSeok Kim | Boseop Kim | Kyunghyun Cho | Gichang Lee | Woomyoung Park | Jung-Woo Ha | Nako Sung
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Many recent studies on large-scale language models have reported successful in-context zero- and few-shot learning ability. However, the in-depth analysis of when in-context learning occurs is still lacking. For example, it is unknown how in-context learning performance changes as the training corpus varies. Here, we investigate the effects of the source and size of the pretraining corpus on in-context learning in HyperCLOVA, a Korean-centric GPT-3 model. From our in-depth investigation, we introduce the following observations: (1) in-context learning performance heavily depends on the corpus domain source, and the size of the pretraining corpus does not necessarily determine the emergence of in-context learning, (2) in-context learning ability can emerge when a language model is trained on a combination of multiple corpora, even when each corpus does not result in in-context learning on its own, (3) pretraining with a corpus related to a downstream task does not always guarantee the competitive in-context learning performance of the downstream task, especially in the few-shot setting, and (4) the relationship between language modeling (measured in perplexity) and in-context learning does not always correlate: e.g., low perplexity does not always imply high in-context few-shot learning performance.

pdf bib
Ground-Truth Labels Matter: A Deeper Look into Input-Label Demonstrations
Kang Min Yoo | Junyeob Kim | Hyuhng Joon Kim | Hyunsoo Cho | Hwiyeol Jo | Sang-Woo Lee | Sang-goo Lee | Taeuk Kim
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Despite recent explosion of interests in in-context learning, the underlying mechanism and the precise impact of the quality of demonstrations remain elusive.Intuitively, ground-truth labels should have as much impact in in-context learning (ICL) as supervised learning, but recent work reported that the input-label correspondence is significantly less important than previously thought.Intrigued by this counter-intuitive observation, we re-examine the importance of ground-truth labels in in-context learning.With the introduction of two novel metrics, namely Label-Correctness Sensitivity and Ground-truth Label Effect Ratio (GLER), we were able to conduct quantifiable analysis on the impact of ground-truth label demonstrations.Through extensive analyses, we find that the correct input-label mappings can have varying impacts on the downstream in-context learning performances, depending on the experimental configuration.Through additional studies, we identify key components, such as the verbosity of prompt templates and the language model size, as the controlling factor to achieve more noise-resilient ICL.

pdf bib
Plug-and-Play Adaptation for Continuously-updated QA
Kyungjae Lee | Wookje Han | Seung-won Hwang | Hwaran Lee | Joonsuk Park | Sang-Woo Lee
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022

Language models (LMs) have shown great potential as implicit knowledge bases (KBs). And for their practical use, knowledge in LMs need to be updated periodically. However, existing tasks to assess LMs’ efficacy as KBs do not adequately consider multiple large-scale updates. To this end, we first propose a novel task—Continuously-updated QA (CuQA)—in which multiple large-scale updates are made to LMs, and the performance is measured with respect to the success in adding and updating knowledge while retaining existing knowledge. We then present LMs with plug-in modules that effectively handle the updates. Experiments conducted on zsRE QA and NQ datasets show that our method outperforms existing approaches. We find that our method is 4x more effective in terms of updates/forgets ratio, compared to a fine-tuning baseline.

pdf bib
Two-Step Question Retrieval for Open-Domain QA
Yeon Seonwoo | Juhee Son | Jiho Jin | Sang-Woo Lee | Ji-Hoon Kim | Jung-Woo Ha | Alice Oh
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022

The retriever-reader pipeline has shown promising performance in open-domain QA but suffers from a very slow inference speed. Recently proposed question retrieval models tackle this problem by indexing question-answer pairs and searching for similar questions. These models have shown a significant increase in inference speed, but at the cost of lower QA performance compared to the retriever-reader models. This paper proposes a two-step question retrieval model, SQuID (Sequential Question-Indexed Dense retrieval) and distant supervision for training. SQuID uses two bi-encoders for question retrieval. The first-step retriever selects top-k similar questions, and the second-step retriever finds the most similar question from the top-k questions. We evaluate the performance and the computational efficiency of SQuID. The results show that SQuID significantly increases the performance of existing question retrieval models with a negligible loss on inference speed.

pdf bib
Keep Me Updated! Memory Management in Long-term Conversations
Sanghwan Bae | Donghyun Kwak | Soyoung Kang | Min Young Lee | Sungdong Kim | Yuin Jeong | Hyeri Kim | Sang-Woo Lee | Woomyoung Park | Nako Sung
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

Remembering important information from the past and continuing to talk about it in the present are crucial in long-term conversations. However, previous literature does not deal with cases where the memorized information is outdated, which may cause confusion in later conversations. To address this issue, we present a novel task and a corresponding dataset of memory management in long-term conversations, in which bots keep track of and bring up the latest information about users while conversing through multiple sessions. In order to support more precise and interpretable memory, we represent memory as unstructured text descriptions of key information and propose a new mechanism of memory management that selectively eliminates invalidated or redundant information. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms the baselines that leave the stored memory unchanged in terms of engagingness and humanness, with larger performance gap especially in the later sessions.

pdf bib
Attribute Injection for Pretrained Language Models: A New Benchmark and an Efficient Method
Reinald Kim Amplayo | Kang Min Yoo | Sang-Woo Lee
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Metadata attributes (e.g., user and product IDs from reviews) can be incorporated as additional inputs to neural-based NLP models, by expanding the architecture of the models to improve performance. However, recent models rely on pretrained language models (PLMs), in which previously used techniques for attribute injection are either nontrivial or cost-ineffective. In this paper, we introduce a benchmark for evaluating attribute injection models, which comprises eight datasets across a diverse range of tasks and domains and six synthetically sparsified ones. We also propose a lightweight and memory-efficient method to inject attributes into PLMs. We extend adapters, i.e. tiny plug-in feed-forward modules, to include attributes both independently of or jointly with the text. We use approximation techniques to parameterize the model efficiently for domains with large attribute vocabularies, and training mechanisms to handle multi-labeled and sparse attributes. Extensive experiments and analyses show that our method outperforms previous attribute injection methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance on all datasets.

pdf bib
Continuous Decomposition of Granularity for Neural Paraphrase Generation
Xiaodong Gu | Zhaowei Zhang | Sang-Woo Lee | Kang Min Yoo | Jung-Woo Ha
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

While Transformers have had significant success in paragraph generation, they treat sentences as linear sequences of tokens and often neglect their hierarchical information. Prior work has shown that decomposing the levels of granularity (e.g., word, phrase, or sentence) for input tokens has produced substantial improvements, suggesting the possibility of enhancing Transformers via more fine-grained modeling of granularity. In this work, we present continuous decomposition of granularity for neural paraphrase generation (C-DNPG): an advanced extension of multi-head self-attention with: 1) a granularity head that automatically infers the hierarchical structure of a sentence by neurally estimating the granularity level of each input token; and 2) two novel attention masks, namely, granularity resonance and granularity scope, to efficiently encode granularity into attention. Experiments on two benchmarks, including Quora question pairs and Twitter URLs have shown that C-DNPG outperforms baseline models by a significant margin. Qualitative analysis reveals that C-DNPG indeed captures fine-grained levels of granularity with effectiveness.

2021

pdf bib
NeuralWOZ: Learning to Collect Task-Oriented Dialogue via Model-Based Simulation
Sungdong Kim | Minsuk Chang | Sang-Woo Lee
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

We propose NeuralWOZ, a novel dialogue collection framework that uses model-based dialogue simulation. NeuralWOZ has two pipelined models, Collector and Labeler. Collector generates dialogues from (1) user’s goal instructions, which are the user context and task constraints in natural language, and (2) system’s API call results, which is a list of possible query responses for user requests from the given knowledge base. Labeler annotates the generated dialogue by formulating the annotation as a multiple-choice problem, in which the candidate labels are extracted from goal instructions and API call results. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in the zero-shot domain transfer learning for dialogue state tracking. In the evaluation, the synthetic dialogue corpus generated from NeuralWOZ achieves a new state-of-the-art with improvements of 4.4% point joint goal accuracy on average across domains, and improvements of 5.7% point of zero-shot coverage against the MultiWOZ 2.1 dataset.

pdf bib
Weakly Supervised Pre-Training for Multi-Hop Retriever
Yeon Seonwoo | Sang-Woo Lee | Ji-Hoon Kim | Jung-Woo Ha | Alice Oh
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

pdf bib
GPT3Mix: Leveraging Large-scale Language Models for Text Augmentation
Kang Min Yoo | Dongju Park | Jaewook Kang | Sang-Woo Lee | Woomyoung Park
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

Large-scale language models such as GPT-3 are excellent few-shot learners, allowing them to be controlled via natural text prompts. Recent studies report that prompt-based direct classification eliminates the need for fine-tuning but lacks data and inference scalability. This paper proposes a novel data augmentation technique that leverages large-scale language models to generate realistic text samples from a mixture of real samples. We also propose utilizing soft-labels predicted by the language models, effectively distilling knowledge from the large-scale language models and creating textual perturbations simultaneously. We perform data augmentation experiments on diverse classification tasks and show that our method hugely outperforms existing text augmentation methods. We also conduct experiments on our newly proposed benchmark to show that the augmentation effect is not only attributed to memorization. Further ablation studies and a qualitative analysis provide more insights into our approach.

pdf bib
What Changes Can Large-scale Language Models Bring? Intensive Study on HyperCLOVA: Billions-scale Korean Generative Pretrained Transformers
Boseop Kim | HyoungSeok Kim | Sang-Woo Lee | Gichang Lee | Donghyun Kwak | Jeon Dong Hyeon | Sunghyun Park | Sungju Kim | Seonhoon Kim | Dongpil Seo | Heungsub Lee | Minyoung Jeong | Sungjae Lee | Minsub Kim | Suk Hyun Ko | Seokhun Kim | Taeyong Park | Jinuk Kim | Soyoung Kang | Na-Hyeon Ryu | Kang Min Yoo | Minsuk Chang | Soobin Suh | Sookyo In | Jinseong Park | Kyungduk Kim | Hiun Kim | Jisu Jeong | Yong Goo Yeo | Donghoon Ham | Dongju Park | Min Young Lee | Jaewook Kang | Inho Kang | Jung-Woo Ha | Woomyoung Park | Nako Sung
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

GPT-3 shows remarkable in-context learning ability of large-scale language models (LMs) trained on hundreds of billion scale data. Here we address some remaining issues less reported by the GPT-3 paper, such as a non-English LM, the performances of different sized models, and the effect of recently introduced prompt optimization on in-context learning. To achieve this, we introduce HyperCLOVA, a Korean variant of 82B GPT-3 trained on a Korean-centric corpus of 560B tokens. Enhanced by our Korean-specific tokenization, HyperCLOVA with our training configuration shows state-of-the-art in-context zero-shot and few-shot learning performances on various downstream tasks in Korean. Also, we show the performance benefits of prompt-based learning and demonstrate how it can be integrated into the prompt engineering pipeline. Then we discuss the possibility of materializing the No Code AI paradigm by providing AI prototyping capabilities to non-experts of ML by introducing HyperCLOVA studio, an interactive prompt engineering interface. Lastly, we demonstrate the potential of our methods with three successful in-house applications.

2020

pdf bib
Efficient Dialogue State Tracking by Selectively Overwriting Memory
Sungdong Kim | Sohee Yang | Gyuwan Kim | Sang-Woo Lee
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Recent works in dialogue state tracking (DST) focus on an open vocabulary-based setting to resolve scalability and generalization issues of the predefined ontology-based approaches. However, they are inefficient in that they predict the dialogue state at every turn from scratch. Here, we consider dialogue state as an explicit fixed-sized memory and propose a selectively overwriting mechanism for more efficient DST. This mechanism consists of two steps: (1) predicting state operation on each of the memory slots, and (2) overwriting the memory with new values, of which only a few are generated according to the predicted state operations. Our method decomposes DST into two sub-tasks and guides the decoder to focus only on one of the tasks, thus reducing the burden of the decoder. This enhances the effectiveness of training and DST performance. Our SOM-DST (Selectively Overwriting Memory for Dialogue State Tracking) model achieves state-of-the-art joint goal accuracy with 51.72% in MultiWOZ 2.0 and 53.01% in MultiWOZ 2.1 in an open vocabulary-based DST setting. In addition, we analyze the accuracy gaps between the current and the ground truth-given situations and suggest that it is a promising direction to improve state operation prediction to boost the DST performance.