Silin Gao


2023

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PeaCoK: Persona Commonsense Knowledge for Consistent and Engaging Narratives
Silin Gao | Beatriz Borges | Soyoung Oh | Deniz Bayazit | Saya Kanno | Hiromi Wakaki | Yuki Mitsufuji | Antoine Bosselut
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Sustaining coherent and engaging narratives requires dialogue or storytelling agents to understandhow the personas of speakers or listeners ground the narrative. Specifically, these agents must infer personas of their listeners to produce statements that cater to their interests. They must also learn to maintain consistent speaker personas for themselves throughout the narrative, so that their counterparts feel involved in a realistic conversation or story. However, personas are diverse and complex: they entail large quantities of rich interconnected world knowledge that is challenging to robustly represent in general narrative systems (e.g., a singer is good at singing, and may have attended conservatoire). In this work, we construct a new large-scale persona commonsense knowledge graph, PeaCoK, containing ~100K human-validated persona facts. Our knowledge graph schematizes five dimensions of persona knowledge identified in previous studies of human interactive behaviours, and distils facts in this schema from both existing commonsense knowledge graphs and large-scale pretrained language models. Our analysis indicates that PeaCoK contains rich and precise world persona inferences that help downstream systems generate more consistent and engaging narratives.

2022

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ComFact: A Benchmark for Linking Contextual Commonsense Knowledge
Silin Gao | Jena D. Hwang | Saya Kanno | Hiromi Wakaki | Yuki Mitsufuji | Antoine Bosselut
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

Understanding rich narratives, such as dialogues and stories, often requires natural language processing systems to access relevant knowledge from commonsense knowledge graphs. However, these systems typically retrieve facts from KGs using simple heuristics that disregard the complex challenges of identifying situationally-relevant commonsense knowledge (e.g., contextualization, implicitness, ambiguity).In this work, we propose the new task of commonsense fact linking, where models are given contexts and trained to identify situationally-relevant commonsense knowledge from KGs. Our novel benchmark, ComFact, contains ~293k in-context relevance annotations for commonsense triplets across four stylistically diverse dialogue and storytelling datasets. Experimental results confirm that heuristic fact linking approaches are imprecise knowledge extractors. Learned fact linking models demonstrate across-the-board performance improvements (~34.6% F1) over these heuristics. Furthermore, improved knowledge retrieval yielded average downstream improvements of 9.8% for a dialogue response generation task. However, fact linking models still significantly underperform humans, suggesting our benchmark is a promising testbed for research in commonsense augmentation of NLP systems.

2021

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HyKnow: End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialog Modeling with Hybrid Knowledge Management
Silin Gao | Ryuichi Takanobu | Wei Peng | Qun Liu | Minlie Huang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

2020

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Paraphrase Augmented Task-Oriented Dialog Generation
Silin Gao | Yichi Zhang | Zhijian Ou | Zhou Yu
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Neural generative models have achieved promising performance on dialog generation tasks if given a huge data set. However, the lack of high-quality dialog data and the expensive data annotation process greatly limit their application in real world settings. We propose a paraphrase augmented response generation (PARG) framework that jointly trains a paraphrase model and a response generation model to improve the dialog generation performance. We also design a method to automatically construct paraphrase training data set based on dialog state and dialog act labels. PARG is applicable to various dialog generation models, such as TSCP (Lei et al., 2018) and DAMD (Zhang et al., 2019). Experimental results show that the proposed framework improves these state-of-the-art dialog models further on CamRest676 and MultiWOZ. PARG also outperforms other data augmentation methods significantly in dialog generation tasks, especially under low resource settings.