E-QGen: Educational Lecture Abstract-based Question Generation System

To optimize the preparation process for educators in academic lectures and associated question-and-answer sessions, this paper presents E-QGen, a lecture abstract-based question generation system. Given a lecture abstract, E-QGen generates potential student inquiries. The questions suggested by our system are expected to not only facilitate teachers in preparing answers in advance but also enable them to supply additional resources when necessary.

How We Refute Claims: Automatic Fact-Checking through Flaw Identification and Explanation

Automated fact-checking is a crucial task in the governance of internet content. Although various studies utilize advanced models to tackle this issue, a significant gap persists in addressing complex real-world rumors and deceptive claims. To address this challenge, this paper explores the novel task of flaw-oriented fact-checking, including aspect generation and flaw identification. We also introduce RefuteClaim, a new framework designed specifically for this task. Given the absence of an existing dataset, we present FlawCheck, a dataset created by extracting and transforming insights from expert reviews into relevant aspects and identified flaws. The experimental results underscore the efficacy of RefuteClaim, particularly in classifying and elucidating false claims.

Three Questions Concerning the Use of Large Language Models to Facilitate Mathematics Learning

Due to the remarkable language understanding and generation abilities of large language models (LLMs), their use in educational applications has been explored. However, little work has been done on investigating the pedagogical ability of LLMs in helping students to learn mathematics. In this position paper, we discuss the challenges associated with employing LLMs to enhance students' mathematical problem-solving skills by providing adaptive feedback. Apart from generating the wrong reasoning processes, LLMs can misinterpret the meaning of the question, and also exhibit difficulty in understanding the given questions' rationales when attempting to correct students' answers. Three research questions are formulated.

RSVP: Customer Intent Detection via Agent Response Contrastive and Generative Pre-Training

The dialogue systems in customer services have been developed with neural models to provide users with precise answers and round-the-clock support in task-oriented conversations by detecting customer intents based on their utterances. Existing intent detection approaches have highly relied on adaptively pre-training language models with large-scale datasets, yet the predominant cost of data collection may hinder their superiority. In addition, they neglect the information within the conversational responses of the agents, which have a lower collection cost, but are significant to customer intent as agents must tailor their replies based on the customers' intent. In this paper, we propose RSVP, a self-supervised framework dedicated to task-oriented dialogues, which utilizes agent responses for pre-training in a two-stage manner. Specifically, we introduce two pre-training tasks to incorporate the relations of utterance-response pairs: 1) Response Retrieval by selecting a correct response from a batch of candidates, and 2) Response Generation by mimicking agents to generate the response to a given utterance. Our benchmark results for two real-world customer service datasets show that RSVP significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines by 4.95% for accuracy, 3.4% for MRR@3, and 2.75% for MRR@5 on average. Extensive case studies are investigated to show the validity of incorporating agent responses into the pre-training stage.

ZARA: Improving Few-Shot Self-Rationalization for Small Language Models

Language models (LMs) that jointly generate end-task answers as well as free-text rationales are known as self-rationalization models. Recent works demonstrate great performance gain for self-rationalization by few-shot prompting LMs with rationale-augmented exemplars. However, the ability to benefit from explanations only emerges with large-scale LMs, which have poor accessibility. In this work, we explore the less-studied setting of leveraging explanations for small LMs to improve few-shot self-rationalization. We first revisit the relationship between rationales and answers. Inspired by the implicit mental process of how human beings assess explanations, we present a novel approach, Zero-shot Augmentation of Rationale-Answer pairs (ZARA), to automatically construct pseudo-parallel data for self-training by reducing the problem of plausibility judgement to natural language inference. Experimental results show ZARA achieves SOTA performance on the FEB benchmark, for both the task accuracy and the explanation metric. In addition, we conduct human and quantitative evaluation validating ZARA's ability to automatically identify plausible and accurate rationale-answer pairs.

LED: A Dataset for Life Event Extraction from Dialogs

Lifelogging has gained more attention due to its wide applications, such as personalized recommendations or memory assistance. The issues of collecting and extracting personal life events have emerged. People often share their life experiences with others through conversations. However, extracting life events from conversations is rarely explored. In this paper, we present Life Event Dialog, a dataset containing fine-grained life event annotations on conversational data. In addition, we initiate a novel conversational life event extraction task and differentiate the task from the public event extraction or the life event extraction from other sources like microblogs. We explore three information extraction (IE) frameworks to address the conversational life event extraction task: OpenIE, relation extraction, and event extraction. A comprehensive empirical analysis of the three baselines is established. The results suggest that the current event extraction model still struggles with extracting life events from human daily conversations. Our proposed life event dialog dataset and in-depth analysis of IE frameworks will facilitate future research on life event extraction from conversations.