参考分辨率旨在识别说话者所引用的实体，在现实世界中更为复杂：新的指称者可以由代理商参与和/或仅仅因为属于共享的物理设置而创建和/或显着。我们的重点是在多模式对话中解决对大屏幕显示上的可视化的引用；至关重要的是，参考分辨率直接参与创建新的可视化的过程。我们描述了通过语言和手势以及新实体建立在大屏幕上出现的可视化的用户引用的注释，这是由于执行用户请求创建新可视化而产生的。我们还描述了我们的参考分辨率管道，该管道依赖于信息状态体系结构来维护对话环境。我们报告有关检测和解决参考文献的结果，模型上下文信息的有效性以及创建可视化的请求不足。我们还尝试了常规的CRF和深度学习 /变压器模型（Bilstm-CRF和Bert-CRF），以在用户话语文本中标记参考。我们的结果表明，尽管CRF仍然表现出色，但转移学习显着提高了深度学习方法的性能，这表明传统方法可能会更好地概括为低资源数据。

了解用户的意图并从句子中识别出语义实体，即自然语言理解（NLU），是许多自然语言处理任务的上游任务。主要挑战之一是收集足够数量的注释数据来培训模型。现有有关文本增强的研究并没有充分考虑实体，因此对于NLU任务的表现不佳。为了解决这个问题，我们提出了一种新型的NLP数据增强技术，实体意识数据增强（EADA），该技术应用了树结构，实体意识到语法树（EAST），以表示句子与对实体的注意相结合。我们的EADA技术会自动从少量注释的数据中构造东方，然后生成大量的培训实例，以进行意图检测和插槽填充。四个数据集的实验结果表明，该技术在准确性和泛化能力方面显着优于现有数据增强方法。

与具有粗粒度信息的Crosswoz（中文）和多发性（英文）数据集相比，没有数据集，可以正确处理细粒度和分层级别信息。在本文中，我们在香港发布了一份粤语知识驱动的对话数据集（KDDRES），将多转谈话中的信息放在一个特定的餐厅。我们的语料库包含0.8k次谈话，它来自10家餐厅，提供不同地区的各种风格。除此之外，我们还设计了细粒度的插槽和意图，以更好地捕获语义信息。基准实验和数据统计分析显示了我们数据集的多样性和丰富的注释。我们认为，KDDRE的出版可以是当前对话数据集的必要补充，以及社会中小企业（中小企业）更适合和更有价值，如为每家餐馆建立定制的对话系统。语料库和基准模型是公开可用的。

在与用户进行交流时，以任务为导向的对话系统必须根据对话历史记录在每个回合时跟踪用户的需求。这个称为对话状态跟踪（DST）的过程至关重要，因为它直接告知下游对话政策。近年来，DST引起了很大的兴趣，文本到文本范式作为受欢迎的方法。在本评论论文中，我们首先介绍任务及其相关的数据集。然后，考虑到最近出版的大量出版物，我们确定了2021 - 2022年研究的重点和研究进展。尽管神经方法已经取得了重大进展，但我们认为对话系统（例如概括性）的某些关键方面仍未得到充实。为了激励未来的研究，我们提出了几种研究途径。

非结构化的文本中存在大量的位置信息，例如社交媒体帖子，新闻报道，科学文章，网页，旅行博客和历史档案。地理学是指识别文本中的位置参考并识别其地理空间表示的过程。虽然地理标准可以使许多领域受益，但仍缺少特定应用程序的摘要。此外，缺乏对位置参考识别方法的现有方法的全面审查和比较，这是地理验证的第一个和核心步骤。为了填补这些研究空白，这篇综述首先总结了七个典型的地理应用程序域：地理信息检索，灾难管理，疾病监视，交通管理，空间人文，旅游管理和犯罪管理。然后，我们通过将这些方法分类为四个组，以基于规则的基于规则，基于统计学学习的基于统计学学习和混合方法将这些方法分类为四个组，从而回顾了现有的方法参考识别方法。接下来，我们彻底评估了27种最广泛使用的方法的正确性和计算效率，该方法基于26个公共数据集，其中包含不同类型的文本（例如，社交媒体帖子和新闻报道），包含39,736个位置参考。这项彻底评估的结果可以帮助未来的方法论发展以获取位置参考识别，并可以根据应用需求指导选择适当方法的选择。

Training dialogue systems often entails dealing with noisy training examples and unexpected user inputs. Despite their prevalence, there currently lacks an accurate survey of dialogue noise, nor is there a clear sense of the impact of each noise type on task performance. This paper addresses this gap by first constructing a taxonomy of noise encountered by dialogue systems. In addition, we run a series of experiments to show how different models behave when subjected to varying levels of noise and types of noise. Our results reveal that models are quite robust to label errors commonly tackled by existing denoising algorithms, but that performance suffers from dialogue-specific noise. Driven by these observations, we design a data cleaning algorithm specialized for conversational settings and apply it as a proof-of-concept for targeted dialogue denoising.

Intent classification and slot filling are two core tasks in natural language understanding (NLU). The interaction nature of the two tasks makes the joint models often outperform the single designs. One of the promising solutions, called BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers), achieves the joint optimization of the two tasks. BERT adopts the wordpiece to tokenize each input token into multiple sub-tokens, which causes a mismatch between the tokens and the labels lengths. Previous methods utilize the hidden states corresponding to the first sub-token as input to the classifier, which limits performance improvement since some hidden semantic informations is discarded in the fine-tune process. To address this issue, we propose a novel joint model based on BERT, which explicitly models the multiple sub-tokens features after wordpiece tokenization, thereby generating the context features that contribute to slot filling. Specifically, we encode the hidden states corresponding to multiple sub-tokens into a context vector via the attention mechanism. Then, we feed each context vector into the slot filling encoder, which preserves the integrity of the sentence. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed model achieves significant improvement on intent classification accuracy, slot filling F1, and sentence-level semantic frame accuracy on two public benchmark datasets. The F1 score of the slot filling in particular has been improved from 96.1 to 98.2 (2.1% absolute) on the ATIS dataset.

最受欢迎的目标导向的对话代理能够理解会话环境。然而，随着虚拟助手的激增，需要下一代代理商也需要了解屏幕上下文，以提供适当的互动体验，更好地了解用户的目标。在本文中，我们提出了一种新颖的多式联合会话框架，其中对话代理的下一个行动及其参数在会话和视觉上下文中共同调节。具体而言，我们提出了一个新的模型，可以在对话中的视觉上下文中推理，并使用给定用户查询的视觉实体填充API参数。我们的模型可以识别颜色和形状等视觉功能以及基于元数据的特征，例如与视觉实体相关联的价格或星级。为了训练我们的模型，由于缺乏合适的多模式会话数据集，我们还提出了一种新颖的多模式对话框模拟器来生成合成数据，并从MTurk收集现实用户数据以提高模型鲁棒性。该建议的模型实现了合理的85％模型精度，而无需高推理延迟。我们还展示了用于多模式虚拟助手的原型家具购物体验中所提出的方法。

Even though machine learning has become the major scene in dialogue research community, the real breakthrough has been blocked by the scale of data available. To address this fundamental obstacle, we introduce the Multi-Domain Wizard-of-Oz dataset (MultiWOZ), a fully-labeled collection of human-human written conversations spanning over multiple domains and topics. At a size of 10k dialogues, it is at least one order of magnitude larger than all previous annotated task-oriented corpora. The contribution of this work apart from the open-sourced dataset labelled with dialogue belief states and dialogue actions is two-fold: firstly, a detailed description of the data collection procedure along with a summary of data structure and analysis is provided. The proposed data-collection pipeline is entirely based on crowd-sourcing without the need of hiring professional annotators; secondly, a set of benchmark results of belief tracking, dialogue act and response generation is reported, which shows the usability of the data and sets a baseline for future studies.

Virtual assistants such as Google Assistant, Alexa and Siri provide a conversational interface to a large number of services and APIs spanning multiple domains. Such systems need to support an ever-increasing number of services with possibly overlapping functionality. Furthermore, some of these services have little to no training data available. Existing public datasets for task-oriented dialogue do not sufficiently capture these challenges since they cover few domains and assume a single static ontology per domain. In this work, we introduce the the Schema-Guided Dialogue (SGD) dataset, containing over 16k multi-domain conversations spanning 16 domains. Our dataset exceeds the existing task-oriented dialogue corpora in scale, while also highlighting the challenges associated with building large-scale virtual assistants. It provides a challenging testbed for a number of tasks including language understanding, slot filling, dialogue state tracking and response generation. Along the same lines, we present a schema-guided paradigm for task-oriented dialogue, in which predictions are made over a dynamic set of intents and slots, provided as input, using their natural language descriptions. This allows a single dialogue system to easily support a large number of services and facilitates simple integration of new services without requiring additional training data. Building upon the proposed paradigm, we release a model for dialogue state tracking capable of zero-shot generalization to new APIs, while remaining competitive in the regular setting.

在科学研究中，该方法是解决科学问题和关键研究对象的必不可少手段。随着科学的发展，正在提出，修改和使用许多科学方法。作者在抽象和身体文本中描述了该方法的详细信息，并且反映该方法名称的学术文献中的关键实体称为方法实体。在大量的学术文献中探索各种方法实体有助于学者了解现有方法，为研究任务选择适当的方法并提出新方法。此外，方法实体的演变可以揭示纪律的发展并促进知识发现。因此，本文对方法论和经验作品进行了系统的综述，重点是从全文学术文献中提取方法实体，并努力使用这些提取的方法实体来建立知识服务。首先提出了本综述涉及的关键概念的定义。基于这些定义，我们系统地审查了提取和评估方法实体的方法和指标，重点是每种方法的利弊。我们还调查了如何使用提取的方法实体来构建新应用程序。最后，讨论了现有作品的限制以及潜在的下一步。

用户模拟器（USS）通常用于通过增强学习训练面向任务的对话系统（DSS）。相互作用通常是在语义层面上以提高效率的，但是从语义动作到自然语言仍然存在差距，这会导致培训和部署环境之间的不匹配。在培训期间，将自然语言生成（NLG）模块与USS结合在一起可以部分解决此问题。但是，由于US的策略和NLG是单独优化的，因此在给定的情况下，这些模拟的用户话语可能不够自然。在这项工作中，我们提出了一个基于生成变压器的用户模拟器（Gentus）。 Gentus由编码器结构组成，这意味着它可以共同优化用户策略和自然语言。 Gentus既产生语义动作又产生自然语言话语，从而保留了解释性和增强语言的变化。另外，通过将输入和输出表示为单词序列以及使用大型的预训练语言模型，我们可以在功能表示中实现普遍性。我们通过自动指标和人类评估评估绅士。我们的结果表明，绅士会产生更多的自然语言，并能够以零拍的方式转移到看不见的本体论中。此外，通过加强学习为培训专业用户模拟器打开大门，可以进一步塑造其行为。

这项工作提出了一个新的对话数据集，即cookdial，该数据集促进了对任务知识了解的面向任务的对话系统的研究。该语料库包含260个以人类对任务为导向的对话框，其中代理给出了配方文档，指导用户烹饪菜肴。 Cookdial中的对话框展示了两个独特的功能：（i）对话流与支持文档之间的程序对齐； （ii）复杂的代理决策涉及分割长句子，解释硬说明并在对话框上下文中解决核心。此外，我们在假定的面向任务的对话框系统中确定了三个具有挑战性的（子）任务：（1）用户问题理解，（2）代理操作框架预测和（3）代理响应生成。对于这些任务中的每一个，我们都会开发一个神经基线模型，我们在cookdial数据集上进行了评估。我们公开发布烹饪数据集，包括对话框和食谱文档的丰富注释，以刺激对特定于域的文档接地对话框系统的进一步研究。

The advances in language-based Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies applied to build educational applications can present AI for social-good opportunities with a broader positive impact. Across many disciplines, enhancing the quality of mathematics education is crucial in building critical thinking and problem-solving skills at younger ages. Conversational AI systems have started maturing to a point where they could play a significant role in helping students learn fundamental math concepts. This work presents a task-oriented Spoken Dialogue System (SDS) built to support play-based learning of basic math concepts for early childhood education. The system has been evaluated via real-world deployments at school while the students are practicing early math concepts with multimodal interactions. We discuss our efforts to improve the SDS pipeline built for math learning, for which we explore utilizing MathBERT representations for potential enhancement to the Natural Language Understanding (NLU) module. We perform an end-to-end evaluation using real-world deployment outputs from the Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Intent Recognition, and Dialogue Manager (DM) components to understand how error propagation affects the overall performance in real-world scenarios.

Diverse data formats and ontologies of task-oriented dialogue (TOD) datasets hinder us from developing general dialogue models that perform well on many datasets and studying knowledge transfer between datasets. To address this issue, we present ConvLab-3, a flexible dialogue system toolkit based on a unified TOD data format. In ConvLab-3, different datasets are transformed into one unified format and loaded by models in the same way. As a result, the cost of adapting a new model or dataset is significantly reduced. Compared to the previous releases of ConvLab (Lee et al., 2019b; Zhu et al., 2020b), ConvLab-3 allows developing dialogue systems with much more datasets and enhances the utility of the reinforcement learning (RL) toolkit for dialogue policies. To showcase the use of ConvLab-3 and inspire future work, we present a comprehensive study with various settings. We show the benefit of pre-training on other datasets for few-shot fine-tuning and RL, and encourage evaluating policy with diverse user simulators.

在过去的十年中，对对话系统的兴趣已经大大增长。从扩展过程中，也有兴趣开发和改进意图分类和插槽填充模型，这是两个组件，这些组件通常在以任务为导向的对话框系统中使用。此外，良好的评估基准对于帮助比较和分析结合此类模型的系统很重要。不幸的是，该领域的许多文献仅限于对相对较少的基准数据集的分析。为了促进针对任务的对话系统的更强大的分析，我们对意图分类和插槽填充任务进行了公开可用数据集的调查。我们分类每个数据集的重要特征，并就每个数据集的适用性，优势和劣势进行讨论。我们的目标是，这项调查有助于提高这些数据集的可访问性，我们希望它们能够在未来评估意图分类和填充插槽模型中用于以任务为导向的对话框系统。

Natural Language Generation (NLG) has improved exponentially in recent years thanks to the development of sequence-to-sequence deep learning technologies such as Transformer-based language models. This advancement has led to more fluent and coherent NLG, leading to improved development in downstream tasks such as abstractive summarization, dialogue generation and data-to-text generation. However, it is also apparent that deep learning based generation is prone to hallucinate unintended text, which degrades the system performance and fails to meet user expectations in many real-world scenarios. To address this issue, many studies have been presented in measuring and mitigating hallucinated texts, but these have never been reviewed in a comprehensive manner before. In this survey, we thus provide a broad overview of the research progress and challenges in the hallucination problem in NLG. The survey is organized into two parts: (1) a general overview of metrics, mitigation methods, and future directions; and (2) an overview of task-specific research progress on hallucinations in the following downstream tasks, namely abstractive summarization, dialogue generation, generative question answering, data-to-text generation, machine translation, and visual-language generation. This survey serves to facilitate collaborative efforts among researchers in tackling the challenge of hallucinated texts in NLG.

插槽填充和意图检测是诸如语音助手的会话代理的骨干，是有效的研究领域。尽管公开的基准上的最先进的技术，但令人印象深刻的性能，他们概括到现实情景的能力尚未得到证明。在这项工作中，我们提出了一种自然，一套简单的口语导向转换，应用于数据集的评估集，在保留话语的语义时引入人类口语变化。我们将大自然应用于共同的插槽填充和意图检测基准，并证明了自然集合的标准评估的简单扰动可以显着降低模型性能。通过我们的实验，我们证明了当自然运营商应用于评估流行基准的评估集时，模型精度可以降低至多40％。

One of the biggest challenges of natural language generation (NLG) is the proper handling of named entities. Named entities are a common source of grammar mistakes such as wrong prepositions, wrong article handling, or incorrect entity inflection. Without factoring linguistic representation, such errors are often underrepresented when evaluating on a small set of arbitrarily picked argument values, or when translating a dataset from a linguistically simpler language, like English, to a linguistically complex language, like Russian. However, for some applications, broadly precise grammatical correctness is critical -- native speakers may find entity-related grammar errors silly, jarring, or even offensive. To enable the creation of more linguistically diverse NLG datasets, we release a Corpus of Linguistically Significant Entities (CLSE) annotated by linguist experts. The corpus includes 34 languages and covers 74 different semantic types to support various applications from airline ticketing to video games. To demonstrate one possible use of CLSE, we produce an augmented version of the Schema-Guided Dialog Dataset, SGD-CLSE. Using the CLSE's entities and a small number of human translations, we create a linguistically representative NLG evaluation benchmark in three languages: French (high-resource), Marathi (low-resource), and Russian (highly inflected language). We establish quality baselines for neural, template-based, and hybrid NLG systems and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each approach.

最近，通过“向导”模拟游戏收集了一类以任务为导向的对话（TOD）数据集。但是，《巫师》数据实际上是模拟的数据，因此与现实生活中的对话根本不同，这些对话更加嘈杂和随意。最近，Seretod挑战赛是组织的，并发布了Mobilecs数据集，该数据集由来自中国移动的真实用户和客户服务人员之间的真实世界对话框组成。基于Mobilecs数据集，Seretod挑战具有两个任务，不仅评估了对话系统本身的构建，而且还检查了对话框成绩单中的信息提取，这对于建立TOD的知识库至关重要。本文主要介绍了Mobilecs数据集对这两项任务的基线研究。我们介绍了如何构建两个基线，遇到的问题以及结果。我们预计基线可以促进令人兴奋的未来研究，以建立针对现实生活任务的人类机器人对话系统。