User-Specific Dialogue Generation with User Profile-Aware Pre-Training Model and Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning

This paper addresses user-specific dialogs. In contrast to previous research on personalized dialogue focused on achieving virtual user dialogue as defined by persona descriptions, user-specific dialogue aims to reproduce real-user dialogue beyond persona-based dialogue. Fine-tuning using the target user's dialogue history is an efficient learning method for a user-specific model. However, it is prone to overfitting and model destruction due to the small amount of data. Therefore, we propose a learning method for user-specific models by combining parameter-efficient fine-tuning with a pre-trained dialogue model that includes user profiles. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning adds a small number of parameters to the entire model, so even small amounts of training data can be trained efficiently and are robust to model destruction. In addition, the pre-trained model, which is learned by adding simple prompts for automatically inferred user profiles, can generate speech with enhanced knowledge of the user's profile, even when there is little training data during fine-tuning. In experiments, we compared the proposed model with large-language-model utterance generation using prompts containing users' personal information. Experiments reproducing real users' utterances revealed that the proposed model can generate utterances with higher reproducibility than the compared methods, even with a small model.

Length-controllable Abstractive Summarization by Guiding with Summary Prototype

We propose a new length-controllable abstractive summarization model. Recent state-of-the-art abstractive summarization models based on encoder-decoder models generate only one summary per source text. However, controllable summarization, especially of the length, is an important aspect for practical applications. Previous studies on length-controllable abstractive summarization incorporate length embeddings in the decoder module for controlling the summary length. Although the length embeddings can control where to stop decoding, they do not decide which information should be included in the summary within the length constraint. Unlike the previous models, our length-controllable abstractive summarization model incorporates a word-level extractive module in the encoder-decoder model instead of length embeddings. Our model generates a summary in two steps. First, our word-level extractor extracts a sequence of important words (we call it the "prototype text") from the source text according to the word-level importance scores and the length constraint. Second, the prototype text is used as additional input to the encoder-decoder model, which generates a summary by jointly encoding and copying words from both the prototype text and source text. Since the prototype text is a guide to both the content and length of the summary, our model can generate an informative and length-controlled summary. Experiments with the CNN/Daily Mail dataset and the NEWSROOM dataset show that our model outperformed previous models in length-controlled settings.

Answering while Summarizing: Multi-task Learning for Multi-hop QA with Evidence Extraction

Question answering (QA) using textual sources for purposes such as reading comprehension (RC) has attracted much attention. This study focuses on the task of explainable multi-hop QA, which requires the system to return the answer with evidence sentences by reasoning and gathering disjoint pieces of the reference texts. It proposes the Query Focused Extractor (QFE) model for evidence extraction and uses multi-task learning with the QA model. QFE is inspired by extractive summarization models; compared with the existing method, which extracts each evidence sentence independently, it sequentially extracts evidence sentences by using an RNN with an attention mechanism on the question sentence. It enables QFE to consider the dependency among the evidence sentences and cover important information in the question sentence. Experimental results show that QFE with a simple RC baseline model achieves a state-of-the-art evidence extraction score on HotpotQA. Although designed for RC, it also achieves a state-of-the-art evidence extraction score on FEVER, which is a recognizing textual entailment task on a large textual database.

Multi-style Generative Reading Comprehension

This study focuses on the task of multi-passage reading comprehension (RC) where an answer is provided in natural language. Current mainstream approaches treat RC by extracting the answer span from the provided passages and cannot generate an abstractive summary from the given question and passages. Moreover, they cannot utilize and control different styles of answers, such as concise phrases and well-formed sentences, within a model. In this study, we propose a style-controllable Multi-source Abstractive Summarization model for QUEstion answering, called Masque. The model is an end-to-end deep neural network that can generate answers conditioned on a given style. Experiments with MS MARCO 2.1 show that our model achieved state-of-the-art performance on two tasks with different answer styles.

Retrieve-and-Read: Multi-task Learning of Information Retrieval and Reading Comprehension

This study considers the task of machine reading at scale (MRS) wherein, given a question, a system first performs the information retrieval (IR) task of finding relevant passages in a knowledge source and then carries out the reading comprehension (RC) task of extracting an answer span from the passages. Previous MRS studies, in which the IR component was trained without considering answer spans, struggled to accurately find a small number of relevant passages from a large set of passages. In this paper, we propose a simple and effective approach that incorporates the IR and RC tasks by using supervised multi-task learning in order that the IR component can be trained by considering answer spans. Experimental results on the standard benchmark, answering SQuAD questions using the full Wikipedia as the knowledge source, showed that our model achieved state-of-the-art performance. Moreover, we thoroughly evaluated the individual contributions of our model components with our new Japanese dataset and SQuAD. The results showed significant improvements in the IR task and provided a new perspective on IR for RC: it is effective to teach which part of the passage answers the question rather than to give only a relevance score to the whole passage.