To address the data scarcity issue in Conversational question answering (ConvQA), a dialog inpainting method, which utilizes documents to generate ConvQA datasets, has been proposed. However, the original dialog inpainting model is trained solely on the dialog reconstruction task, resulting in the generation of questions with low contextual relevance due to insufficient learning of question-answer alignment. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel framework called Dialogizer, which has the capability to automatically generate ConvQA datasets with high contextual relevance from textual sources. The framework incorporates two training tasks: question-answer matching (QAM) and topic-aware dialog generation (TDG). Moreover, re-ranking is conducted during the inference phase based on the contextual relevance of the generated questions. Using our framework, we produce four ConvQA datasets by utilizing documents from multiple domains as the primary source. Through automatic evaluation using diverse metrics, as well as human evaluation, we validate that our proposed framework exhibits the ability to generate datasets of higher quality compared to the baseline dialog inpainting model.

In task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems designed to aid users accomplish specific goals in one or more domains, the agent retrieves entities that satisfy user constraints from the database. However, when multiple database search results exist, an ambiguity occurs regarding which results to select and present to the user. Existing TOD systems handle this ambiguity by randomly selecting one or few results and presenting their names to the user. However, in a real scenario, users do not always accept a randomly recommended entity, and users should have access to more comprehensive information about the search results. To address this limitation, we propose a novel task called Comparison-Based database search Ambiguity handling (CBA), which handles ambiguity in database search results by comparing the properties of multiple entities to enable users to choose according to their preferences. Accordingly, we introduce a new framework for automatically collecting high-quality dialogue data along with the Disambiguating Schema-guided Dialogue (DSD) dataset, an augmented version of the SGD dataset. Experimental studies on the DSD dataset demonstrate that training baseline models with the dataset effectively address the CBA task. Our dataset and code will be publicized.

Vulnerability to lexical perturbation is a critical weakness of automatic evaluation metrics for image captioning. This paper proposes Perturbation Robust Multi-Lingual CLIPScore(PR-MCS), which exhibits robustness to such perturbations, as a novel reference-free image captioning metric applicable to multiple languages. To achieve perturbation robustness, we fine-tune the text encoder of CLIP with our language-agnostic method to distinguish the perturbed text from the original text. To verify the robustness of PR-MCS, we introduce a new fine-grained evaluation dataset consisting of detailed captions, critical objects, and the relationships between the objects for 3,000 images in five languages. In our experiments, PR-MCS significantly outperforms baseline metrics in capturing lexical noise of all various perturbation types in all five languages, while maintaining a strong correlation with human judgments.

Video-and-Language learning, such as video question answering or video captioning, is the next challenge in the deep learning society, as it pursues the way how human intelligence perceives everyday life. These tasks require the ability of multi-modal reasoning which is to handle both visual information and text information simultaneously across time. In this point of view, a cross-modality attention module that fuses video representation and text representation takes a critical role in most recent approaches. However, existing Video-and-Language models merely compute the attention weights without considering the different characteristics of video modality and text modality. Such na ̈ıve attention module hinders the current models to fully enjoy the strength of cross-modality. In this paper, we propose a novel Modality Alignment method that benefits the cross-modality attention module by guiding it to easily amalgamate multiple modalities. Specifically, we exploit Centered Kernel Alignment (CKA) which was originally proposed to measure the similarity between two deep representations. Our method directly optimizes CKA to make an alignment between video and text embedding representations, hence it aids the cross-modality attention module to combine information over different modalities. Experiments on real-world Video QA tasks demonstrate that our method outperforms conventional multi-modal methods significantly with +3.57% accuracy increment compared to the baseline in a popular benchmark dataset. Additionally, in a synthetic data environment, we show that learning the alignment with our method boosts the performance of the cross-modality attention.