Chujie Zheng


2023

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Click: Controllable Text Generation with Sequence Likelihood Contrastive Learning
Chujie Zheng | Pei Ke | Zheng Zhang | Minlie Huang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

It has always been an important yet challenging problem to control language models to avoid generating texts with undesirable attributes, such as toxic language and unnatural repetition. We introduce Leo for controllable text generation, which needs no modification to the model architecture and facilitates out-of-the-box use of trained models. It employs a contrastive loss on sequence likelihood, which fundamentally decreases the generation probability of negative samples (i.e., generations with undesirable attributes). It also adopts a novel likelihood ranking-based strategy to construct contrastive samples from model generations. On the tasks of language detoxification, sentiment steering, and repetition reduction, we show that Leo outperforms strong baselines of controllable text generation and demonstrate the superiority of Leo’s sample construction strategy.

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AugESC: Dialogue Augmentation with Large Language Models for Emotional Support Conversation
Chujie Zheng | Sahand Sabour | Jiaxin Wen | Zheng Zhang | Minlie Huang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Crowdsourced dialogue corpora are usually limited in scale and topic coverage due to the expensive cost of data curation. This would hinder the generalization of downstream dialogue models to open-domain topics. In this work, we leverage large language models for dialogue augmentation in the task of emotional support conversation (ESC). By treating dialogue augmentation as a dialogue completion task, we prompt a fine-tuned language model to complete full dialogues from available dialogue posts of various topics, which are then postprocessed based on heuristics. Applying this approach, we construct AugESC, an augmented dataset for the ESC task, which largely extends the scale and topic coverage of the crowdsourced ESConv corpus. Through comprehensive human evaluation, we demonstrate that our approach is superior to strong baselines of dialogue augmentation and that AugESC has comparable dialogue quality to the crowdsourced corpus. We also conduct human interactive evaluation and prove that post-training on AugESC improves downstream dialogue models’ generalization ability to open-domain topics. These results suggest the utility of AugESC and highlight the potential of large language models in improving data-scarce dialogue generation tasks.

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CASE: Aligning Coarse-to-Fine Cognition and Affection for Empathetic Response Generation
Jinfeng Zhou | Chujie Zheng | Bo Wang | Zheng Zhang | Minlie Huang
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Empathetic conversation is psychologically supposed to be the result of conscious alignment and interaction between the cognition and affection of empathy. However, existing empathetic dialogue models usually consider only the affective aspect or treat cognition and affection in isolation, which limits the capability of empathetic response generation. In this work, we propose the CASE model for empathetic dialogue generation. It first builds upon a commonsense cognition graph and an emotional concept graph and then aligns the user’s cognition and affection at both the coarse-grained and fine-grained levels. Through automatic and manual evaluation, we demonstrate that CASE outperforms state-of-the-art baselines of empathetic dialogues and can generate more empathetic and informative responses.

2022

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CDConv: A Benchmark for Contradiction Detection in Chinese Conversations
Chujie Zheng | Jinfeng Zhou | Yinhe Zheng | Libiao Peng | Zhen Guo | Wenquan Wu | Zheng-Yu Niu | Hua Wu | Minlie Huang
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Dialogue contradiction is a critical issue in open-domain dialogue systems. The contextualization nature of conversations makes dialogue contradiction detection rather challenging. In this work, we propose a benchmark for Contradiction Detection in Chinese Conversations, namely CDConv. It contains 12K multi-turn conversations annotated with three typical contradiction categories: Intra-sentence Contradiction, Role Confusion, and History Contradiction. To efficiently construct the CDConv conversations, we devise a series of methods for automatic conversation generation, which simulate common user behaviors that trigger chatbots to make contradictions. We conduct careful manual quality screening of the constructed conversations and show that state-of-the-art Chinese chatbots can be easily goaded into making contradictions. Experiments on CDConv show that properly modeling contextual information is critical for dialogue contradiction detection, but there are still unresolved challenges that require future research.

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COLD: A Benchmark for Chinese Offensive Language Detection
Jiawen Deng | Jingyan Zhou | Hao Sun | Chujie Zheng | Fei Mi | Helen Meng | Minlie Huang
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Offensive language detection is increasingly crucial for maintaining a civilized social media platform and deploying pre-trained language models. However, this task in Chinese is still under exploration due to the scarcity of reliable datasets. To this end, we propose a benchmark –COLD for Chinese offensive language analysis, including a Chinese Offensive Language Dataset –COLDATASET and a baseline detector –COLDETECTOR which is trained on the dataset. We show that the COLD benchmark contributes to Chinese offensive language detection which is challenging for existing resources. We then deploy the COLDETECTOR and conduct detailed analyses on popular Chinese pre-trained language models. We first analyze the offensiveness of existing generative models and show that these models inevitably expose varying degrees of offensive issues. Furthermore, we investigate the factors that influence the offensive generations, and we find that anti-bias contents and keywords referring to certain groups or revealing negative attitudes trigger offensive outputs easier.

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On the Safety of Conversational Models: Taxonomy, Dataset, and Benchmark
Hao Sun | Guangxuan Xu | Jiawen Deng | Jiale Cheng | Chujie Zheng | Hao Zhou | Nanyun Peng | Xiaoyan Zhu | Minlie Huang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022

Dialogue safety problems severely limit the real-world deployment of neural conversational models and have attracted great research interests recently. However, dialogue safety problems remain under-defined and the corresponding dataset is scarce. We propose a taxonomy for dialogue safety specifically designed to capture unsafe behaviors in human-bot dialogue settings, with focuses on context-sensitive unsafety, which is under-explored in prior works. To spur research in this direction, we compile DiaSafety, a dataset with rich context-sensitive unsafe examples. Experiments show that existing safety guarding tools fail severely on our dataset. As a remedy, we train a dialogue safety classifier to provide a strong baseline for context-sensitive dialogue unsafety detection. With our classifier, we perform safety evaluations on popular conversational models and show that existing dialogue systems still exhibit concerning context-sensitive safety problems.

2021

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CoMAE: A Multi-factor Hierarchical Framework for Empathetic Response Generation
Chujie Zheng | Yong Liu | Wei Chen | Yongcai Leng | Minlie Huang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

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PsyQA: A Chinese Dataset for Generating Long Counseling Text for Mental Health Support
Hao Sun | Zhenru Lin | Chujie Zheng | Siyang Liu | Minlie Huang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

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Towards Emotional Support Dialog Systems
Siyang Liu | Chujie Zheng | Orianna Demasi | Sahand Sabour | Yu Li | Zhou Yu | Yong Jiang | Minlie Huang
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Emotional support is a crucial ability for many conversation scenarios, including social interactions, mental health support, and customer service chats. Following reasonable procedures and using various support skills can help to effectively provide support. However, due to the lack of a well-designed task and corpora of effective emotional support conversations, research on building emotional support into dialog systems remains lacking. In this paper, we define the Emotional Support Conversation (ESC) task and propose an ESC Framework, which is grounded on the Helping Skills Theory. We construct an Emotion Support Conversation dataset (ESConv) with rich annotation (especially support strategy) in a help-seeker and supporter mode. To ensure a corpus of high-quality conversations that provide examples of effective emotional support, we take extensive effort to design training tutorials for supporters and several mechanisms for quality control during data collection. Finally, we evaluate state-of-the-art dialog models with respect to the ability to provide emotional support. Our results show the importance of support strategies in providing effective emotional support and the utility of ESConv in training more emotional support systems.

2020

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Difference-aware Knowledge Selection for Knowledge-grounded Conversation Generation
Chujie Zheng | Yunbo Cao | Daxin Jiang | Minlie Huang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020

In a multi-turn knowledge-grounded dialog, the difference between the knowledge selected at different turns usually provides potential clues to knowledge selection, which has been largely neglected in previous research. In this paper, we propose a difference-aware knowledge selection method. It first computes the difference between the candidate knowledge sentences provided at the current turn and those chosen in the previous turns. Then, the differential information is fused with or disentangled from the contextual information to facilitate final knowledge selection. Automatic, human observational, and interactive evaluation shows that our method is able to select knowledge more accurately and generate more informative responses, significantly outperforming the state-of-the-art baselines.

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KdConv: A Chinese Multi-domain Dialogue Dataset Towards Multi-turn Knowledge-driven Conversation
Hao Zhou | Chujie Zheng | Kaili Huang | Minlie Huang | Xiaoyan Zhu
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

The research of knowledge-driven conversational systems is largely limited due to the lack of dialog data which consists of multi-turn conversations on multiple topics and with knowledge annotations. In this paper, we propose a Chinese multi-domain knowledge-driven conversation dataset, KdConv, which grounds the topics in multi-turn conversations to knowledge graphs. Our corpus contains 4.5K conversations from three domains (film, music, and travel), and 86K utterances with an average turn number of 19.0. These conversations contain in-depth discussions on related topics and natural transition between multiple topics. To facilitate the following research on this corpus, we provide several benchmark models. Comparative results show that the models can be enhanced by introducing background knowledge, yet there is still a large space for leveraging knowledge to model multi-turn conversations for further research. Results also show that there are obvious performance differences between different domains, indicating that it is worth further explore transfer learning and domain adaptation. The corpus and benchmark models are publicly available.

2019

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ChID: A Large-scale Chinese IDiom Dataset for Cloze Test
Chujie Zheng | Minlie Huang | Aixin Sun
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Cloze-style reading comprehension in Chinese is still limited due to the lack of various corpora. In this paper we propose a large-scale Chinese cloze test dataset ChID, which studies the comprehension of idiom, a unique language phenomenon in Chinese. In this corpus, the idioms in a passage are replaced by blank symbols and the correct answer needs to be chosen from well-designed candidate idioms. We carefully study how the design of candidate idioms and the representation of idioms affect the performance of state-of-the-art models. Results show that the machine accuracy is substantially worse than that of human, indicating a large space for further research.