Dongkyu Lee


2024

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Efficient Dynamic Hard Negative Sampling for Dialogue Selection
Janghoon Han | Dongkyu Lee | Joongbo Shin | Hyunkyung Bae | Jeesoo Bang | Seonghwan Kim | Stanley Jungkyu Choi | Honglak Lee
Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on NLP for Conversational AI (NLP4ConvAI 2024)

Recent studies have demonstrated significant improvements in selection tasks, and a considerable portion of this success is attributed to incorporating informative negative samples during training. While traditional methods for constructing hard negatives provide meaningful supervision, they depend on static samples that do not evolve during training, leading to sub-optimal performance. Dynamic hard negative sampling addresses this limitation by continuously adapting to the model’s changing state throughout training. However, the high computational demands of this method restrict its applicability to certain model architectures. To overcome these challenges, we introduce an efficient dynamic hard negative sampling (EDHNS). EDHNS enhances efficiency by pre-filtering easily discriminable negatives, thereby reducing the number of candidates the model needs to compute during training. Additionally, it excludes question-candidate pairs where the model already exhibits high confidence from loss computations, further reducing training time. These approaches maintain learning quality while minimizing computation and streamlining the training process. Extensive experiments on DSTC9, DSTC10, Ubuntu, and E-commerce benchmarks demonstrate that EDHNS significantly outperforms baseline models, proving its effectiveness in dialogue selection tasks.

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MATTER: Memory-Augmented Transformer Using Heterogeneous Knowledge Sources
Dongkyu Lee | Chandana Satya Prakash | Jack FitzGerald | Jens Lehmann
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024

Leveraging external knowledge is crucial for achieving high performance in knowledge-intensive tasks, such as question answering. The retrieve-and-read approach is widely adopted for integrating external knowledge into a language model. However, this approach suffers from increased computational cost and latency due to the long context length, which grows proportionally with the number of retrieved knowledge. Furthermore, existing retrieval-augmented models typically retrieve information from a single type of knowledge source, limiting their scalability to diverse knowledge sources with varying structures. In this work, we introduce an efficient memory-augmented transformer called MATTER, designed to retrieve relevant knowledge from multiple heterogeneous knowledge sources. Specifically, our model retrieves and reads from both unstructured sources (paragraphs) and semi-structured sources (QA pairs) in the form of fixed-length neural memories. We demonstrate that our model outperforms existing efficient retrieval-augmented models on popular QA benchmarks in terms of both accuracy and speed. Furthermore, MATTER achieves competitive results compared to conventional read-and-retrieve models while having 100x throughput during inference.

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Exploring the Use of Natural Language Descriptions of Intents for Large Language Models in Zero-shot Intent Classification
Taesuk Hong | Youbin Ahn | Dongkyu Lee | Joongbo Shin | Seungpil Won | Janghoon Han | Stanley Jungkyu Choi | Jungyun Seo
Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue

In task-oriented dialogue systems, intent classification is crucial for accurately understanding user queries and providing appropriate services. This study explores the use of intent descriptions with large language models for unseen domain intent classification. By examining the effects of description quality, quantity, and input length management, we identify practical guidelines for optimizing performance. Our experiments using FLAN-T5 3B demonstrate that 1) high-quality descriptions for both training and testing significantly improve accuracy, 2) diversity in training descriptions doesn’t greatly affect performance, and 3) off-the-shelf rankers selecting around ten intent options reduce input length without compromising performance. We emphasize that high-quality testing descriptions have a greater impact on accuracy than training descriptions. These findings provide practical guidelines for using intent descriptions with large language models to achieve effective and efficient intent classification in low-resource settings.

2023

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Local Temperature Beam Search: Avoid Neural Text DeGeneration via Enhanced Calibration
Dongkyu Lee | Gyeonghun Kim | Janghoon Han | Taesuk Hong | Yi-Reun Kim | Stanley Jungkyu Choi | Nevin L. Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Previous studies have constantly observed that a language model repeats itself, creating repetitions in an output sequence. To cope with the issue, stochastic decoding schemes have been the de facto approaches; the strategies add randomness in inference, hence avoiding the “self-loop”. However, the remedy comes at the cost of sacrificing output quality due to the randomness involved. In this work, we introduce a deterministic decoding scheme, local temperature beam search. This inference algorithm is an embarrassingly simple variant of beam search, yet it reduces repetition, whose level is superior to that of a sampling-based decoding algorithm, while maintaining the level of coherence as in beam search. Our idea is rooted in the concept of model calibration; we view a repetition as a casualty from overconfidence in a model. Therefore, our work mitigates the miscalibration present in the course of inference with a post-calibration approach applied in beam-specific manner. Our inference scheme is validated on text completion tasks, in which the repetition problem is seen most clearly, and is exhaustively compared with existing inference schemes.

2022

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Improving Meta-learning for Low-resource Text Classification and Generation via Memory Imitation
Yingxiu Zhao | Zhiliang Tian | Huaxiu Yao | Yinhe Zheng | Dongkyu Lee | Yiping Song | Jian Sun | Nevin Zhang
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Building models of natural language processing (NLP) is challenging in low-resource scenarios where limited data are available. Optimization-based meta-learning algorithms achieve promising results in low-resource scenarios by adapting a well-generalized model initialization to handle new tasks. Nonetheless, these approaches suffer from the memorization overfitting issue, where the model tends to memorize the meta-training tasks while ignoring support sets when adapting to new tasks. To address this issue, we propose a memory imitation meta-learning (MemIML) method that enhances the model’s reliance on support sets for task adaptation. Specifically, we introduce a task-specific memory module to store support set information and construct an imitation module to force query sets to imitate the behaviors of support sets stored in the memory. A theoretical analysis is provided to prove the effectiveness of our method, and empirical results also demonstrate that our method outperforms competitive baselines on both text classification and generation tasks.

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Adaptive Label Smoothing with Self-Knowledge in Natural Language Generation
Dongkyu Lee | Ka Chun Cheung | Nevin Zhang
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Overconfidence has been shown to impair generalization and calibration of a neural network. Previous studies remedy this issue by adding a regularization term to a loss function, preventing a model from making a peaked distribution. Label smoothing smoothes target labels with a pre-defined prior label distribution; as a result, a model is learned to maximize the likelihood of predicting the soft label. Nonetheless, the amount of smoothing is the same in all samples and remains fixed in training. In other words, label smoothing does not reflect the change in probability distribution mapped by a model over the course of training. To address this issue, we propose a regularization scheme that brings dynamic nature into the smoothing parameter by taking model probability distribution into account, thereby varying the parameter per instance. A model in training self-regulates the extent of smoothing on the fly during forward propagation. Furthermore, inspired by recent work in bridging label smoothing and knowledge distillation, our work utilizes self-knowledge as a prior label distribution in softening target labels, and presents theoretical support for the regularization effect by knowledge distillation and the dynamic smoothing parameter. Our regularizer is validated comprehensively, and the result illustrates marked improvements in model generalization and calibration, enhancing robustness and trustworthiness of a model.

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Hard Gate Knowledge Distillation - Leverage Calibration for Robust and Reliable Language Model
Dongkyu Lee | Zhiliang Tian | Yingxiu Zhao | Ka Chun Cheung | Nevin Zhang
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

In knowledge distillation, a student model is trained with supervisions from both knowledge from a teacher and observations drawn from a training data distribution. Knowledge of a teacher is considered a subject that holds inter-class relations which send a meaningful supervision to a student; hence, much effort has been put to find such knowledge to be distilled. In this paper, we explore a question that has been given little attention: “when to distill such knowledge.” The question is answered in our work with the concept of model calibration; we view a teacher model not only as a source of knowledge but also as a gauge to detect miscalibration of a student. This simple and yet novel view leads to a hard gate knowledge distillation scheme that switches between learning from a teacher model and training data. We verify the gating mechanism in the context of natural language generation at both the token-level and the sentence-level. Empirical comparisons with strong baselines show that hard gate knowledge distillation not only improves model generalization, but also significantly lowers model calibration error.

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Semi-Supervised Lifelong Language Learning
Yingxiu Zhao | Yinhe Zheng | Bowen Yu | Zhiliang Tian | Dongkyu Lee | Jian Sun | Yongbin Li | Nevin L. Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

Lifelong learning aims to accumulate knowledge and alleviate catastrophic forgetting when learning tasks sequentially. However, existing lifelong language learning methods only focus on the supervised learning setting. Unlabeled data, which can be easily accessed in real-world scenarios, are underexplored. In this paper, we explore a novel setting, semi-supervised lifelong language learning (SSLL), where a model learns sequentially arriving language tasks with both labeled and unlabeled data. We propose an unlabeled data enhanced lifelong learner to explore SSLL. Specially, we dedicate task-specific modules to alleviate catastrophic forgetting and design two modules to exploit unlabeled data: (1) a virtual supervision enhanced task solver is constructed on a teacher-student framework to mine the underlying knowledge from unlabeled data; and (2) a backward augmented learner is built to encourage knowledge transfer from newly arrived unlabeled data to previous tasks. Experimental results on various language tasks demonstrate our model’s effectiveness and superiority over competitive baselines under the new setting SSLL.

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Empathetic and Emotionally Positive Conversation Systems with an Emotion-specific Query-Response Memory
Zhiliang Tian | Yinliang Wang | Yiping Song | Chi Zhang | Dongkyu Lee | Yingxiu Zhao | Dongsheng Li | Nevin L. Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

Emotional conversation systems generate responses for the input queries considering the speaker’s emotions in a conversation. Existing emotional conversation systems output emotional responses according to either a given emotion or the user’s emotion reflected in the input queries. Following a given emotion may lead to an emotional drift between the given emotion and the conversation state, and following only the user’s emotion may aggravate the user’s negative feelings if users suffer from a negative mood. In this paper, we propose to generate empathetic responses catering to the user’s emotions while leading the conversation to be emotionally positive. Particularly, by abstracting the conversation corpus, we extract and store the different responding strategies for different users’ emotions and conversational topics into a memory. We encourage positive emotions in conversation via a sentiment evaluator. We model the memory outputs with a Gaussian mixture distribution and sample a final responding strategy from the distribution. The strategy acts as a condition to a transformer model to generate responses. The experiments verify our model surpasses the baseline methods in appropriateness, diversity, and generating emotionally positive responses.

2021

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Enhancing Content Preservation in Text Style Transfer Using Reverse Attention and Conditional Layer Normalization
Dongkyu Lee | Zhiliang Tian | Lanqing Xue | Nevin L. Zhang
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)

Text style transfer aims to alter the style (e.g., sentiment) of a sentence while preserving its content. A common approach is to map a given sentence to content representation that is free of style, and the content representation is fed to a decoder with a target style. Previous methods in filtering style completely remove tokens with style at the token level, which incurs the loss of content information. In this paper, we propose to enhance content preservation by implicitly removing the style information of each token with reverse attention, and thereby retain the content. Furthermore, we fuse content information when building the target style representation, making it dynamic with respect to the content. Our method creates not only style-independent content representation, but also content-dependent style representation in transferring style. Empirical results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines by a large margin in terms of content preservation. In addition, it is also competitive in terms of style transfer accuracy and fluency.

2020

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Response-Anticipated Memory for On-Demand Knowledge Integration in Response Generation
Zhiliang Tian | Wei Bi | Dongkyu Lee | Lanqing Xue | Yiping Song | Xiaojiang Liu | Nevin L. Zhang
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Neural conversation models are known to generate appropriate but non-informative responses in general. A scenario where informativeness can be significantly enhanced is Conversing by Reading (CbR), where conversations take place with respect to a given external document. In previous work, the external document is utilized by (1) creating a context-aware document memory that integrates information from the document and the conversational context, and then (2) generating responses referring to the memory. In this paper, we propose to create the document memory with some anticipated responses in mind. This is achieved using a teacher-student framework. The teacher is given the external document, the context, and the ground-truth response, and learns how to build a response-aware document memory from three sources of information. The student learns to construct a response-anticipated document memory from the first two sources, and teacher’s insight on memory creation. Empirical results show that our model outperforms the previous state-of-the-art for the CbR task.