Weichao Wang


2023

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Improving Factual Consistency for Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Systems via Knowledge Enhancement and Alignment
Boyang Xue | Weichao Wang | Hongru Wang | Fei Mi | Rui Wang | Yasheng Wang | Lifeng Shang | Xin Jiang | Qun Liu | Kam-Fai Wong
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Pretrained language models (PLMs) based knowledge-grounded dialogue systems are prone to generate responses that are factually inconsistent with the provided knowledge source. In such inconsistent responses, the dialogue models fail to accurately express the external factual knowledge they rely upon. Inspired by previous work which identified that feedforward networks (FFNs) within Transformers are responsible for factual knowledge expressions, we investigate two methods to efficiently improve the factual expression capability of FFNs by knowledge enhancement and alignment respectively. We first propose K-Dial, which explicitly introduces extended FFNs in Transformers to enhance factual knowledge expressions given the specific patterns of knowledge-grounded dialogue inputs. Additionally, we apply the reinforcement learning for factual consistency (RLFC) method to implicitly adjust FFNs’ expressions in responses by aligning with gold knowledge for the factual consistency preference. To comprehensively assess the factual consistency and dialogue quality of responses, we employ extensive automatic measures and human evaluations including sophisticated fine-grained NLI-based metrics. Experimental results on WoW and CMU_DoG datasets demonstrate that our methods efficiently enhance the ability of the FFN module to convey factual knowledge, validating the efficacy of improving factual consistency for knowledge-grounded dialogue systems.

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Large Language Models as Source Planner for Personalized Knowledge-grounded Dialogues
Hongru Wang | Minda Hu | Yang Deng | Rui Wang | Fei Mi | Weichao Wang | Yasheng Wang | Wai-Chung Kwan | Irwin King | Kam-Fai Wong
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Open-domain dialogue system usually requires different sources of knowledge to generate more informative and evidential responses. However, existing knowledge-grounded dialogue systems either focus on a single knowledge source or overlook the dependency between multiple sources of knowledge, which may result in generating inconsistent or even paradoxical responses. To incorporate multiple knowledge sources and dependencies between them, we propose SAFARI, a novel framework that leverages the exceptional capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in planning, understanding, and incorporating under both supervised and unsupervised settings. Specifically, SAFARI decouples the knowledge grounding into multiple sources and response generation, which allows easy extension to various knowledge sources including the possibility of not using any sources. To study the problem, we construct a personalized knowledge-grounded dialogue dataset Knowledge Behind Persona (KBP), which is the first to consider the dependency between persona and implicit knowledge. Experimental results on the KBP dataset demonstrate that the SAFARI framework can effectively produce persona-consistent and knowledge-enhanced responses.

2022

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Modeling Complex Dialogue Mappings via Sentence Semantic Segmentation Guided Conditional Variational Auto-Encoder
Bin Sun | Shaoxiong Feng | Yiwei Li | Weichao Wang | Fei Mi | Yitong Li | Kan Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

Complex dialogue mappings (CDM), including one-to-many and many-to-one mappings, tend to make dialogue models generate incoherent or dull responses, and modeling these mappings remains a huge challenge for neural dialogue systems. To alleviate these problems, methods like introducing external information, reconstructing the optimization function, and manipulating data samples are proposed, while they primarily focus on avoiding training with CDM, inevitably weakening the model’s ability of understanding CDM in human conversations and limiting further improvements in model performance. This paper proposes a Sentence Semantic Segmentation guided Conditional Variational Auto-Encoder (SegCVAE) method which can model and take advantages of the CDM data. Specifically, to tackle the incoherent problem caused by one-to-many, SegCVAE uses response-related prominent semantics to constrained the latent variable. To mitigate the non-diverse problem brought by many-to-one, SegCVAE segments multiple prominent semantics to enrich the latent variables. Three novel components, Internal Separation, External Guidance, and Semantic Norms, are proposed to achieve SegCVAE. On dialogue generation tasks, both the automatic and human evaluation results show that SegCVAE achieves new state-of-the-art performance.

2019

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Answer-guided and Semantic Coherent Question Generation in Open-domain Conversation
Weichao Wang | Shi Feng | Daling Wang | Yifei Zhang
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Generating intriguing question is a key step towards building human-like open-domain chatbots. Although some recent works have focused on this task, compared with questions raised by humans, significant gaps remain in maintaining semantic coherence with post, which may result in generating dull or deviated questions. We observe that the answer has strong semantic coherence to its question and post, which can be used to guide question generation. Thus, we devise two methods to further enhance semantic coherence between post and question under the guidance of answer. First, the coherence score between generated question and answer is used as the reward function in a reinforcement learning framework, to encourage the cases that are consistent with the answer in semantic. Second, we incorporate adversarial training to explicitly control question generation in the direction of question-answer coherence. Extensive experiments show that our two methods outperform state-of-the-art baseline algorithms with large margins in raising semantic coherent questions.

2018

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Personalized Microblog Sentiment Classification via Adversarial Cross-lingual Multi-task Learning
Weichao Wang | Shi Feng | Wei Gao | Daling Wang | Yifei Zhang
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Sentiment expression in microblog posts can be affected by user’s personal character, opinion bias, political stance and so on. Most of existing personalized microblog sentiment classification methods suffer from the insufficiency of discriminative tweets for personalization learning. We observed that microblog users have consistent individuality and opinion bias in different languages. Based on this observation, in this paper we propose a novel user-attention-based Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model with adversarial cross-lingual learning framework. The user attention mechanism is leveraged in CNN model to capture user’s language-specific individuality from the posts. Then the attention-based CNN model is incorporated into a novel adversarial cross-lingual learning framework, in which with the help of user properties as bridge between languages, we can extract the language-specific features and language-independent features to enrich the user post representation so as to alleviate the data insufficiency problem. Results on English and Chinese microblog datasets confirm that our method outperforms state-of-the-art baseline algorithms with large margins.