Performance of spoken language understanding (SLU) can be degraded with automatic speech recognition (ASR) errors. We propose a novel approach to improve SLU robustness by randomly corrupting clean training text with an ASR error simulator, followed by self-correcting the errors and minimizing the target classification loss in a joint manner. In the proposed error simulator, we leverage confusion networks generated from an ASR decoder without human transcriptions to generate a variety of error patterns for model training. We evaluate our approach on the DSTC10 challenge targeted for knowledge-grounded task-oriented conversational dialogues with ASR errors. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our proposed approach, boosting the knowledge-seeking turn detection (KTD) F1 significantly from 0.9433 to 0.9904. Knowledge cluster classification is boosted from 0.7924 to 0.9333 in Recall@1. After knowledge document re-ranking, our approach shows significant improvement in all knowledge selection metrics, from 0.7358 to 0.7806 in Recall@1, from 0.8301 to 0.9333 in Recall@5, and from 0.7798 to 0.8460 in MRR@5 on the test set. In the recent DSTC10 evaluation, our approach demonstrates significant improvement in knowledge selection, boosting Recall@1 from 0.495 to 0.7144 compared to the official baseline. Our source code is released in GitHub https://github.com/yctam/dstc10_track2_task2.git.

面向任务导向的对话系统已经受到获得大规模和高质量的注释对话的困难困扰。此外，大多数公开的数据集仅包括书面对话，这不足以反映实际口头对话系统中的实际人类行为。在本文中，我们提出了面向任务的对话数据增强（TOD-DA），这是一种新型模型 - 不可知的数据增强范例，以提高面向任务对话建模的鲁棒性。 TOD-DA由两个模块组成：1）对话丰富，以扩展关于易于执行数据稀疏性的任务对话的培训数据，用于宽松数据稀疏性和2）口语对话模拟器，以模仿各种粒度的口语样式表达和语音识别错误，以弥合书面之间的差距和口头对话。通过这样的设计，我们的方法在DSTC10 Track2的两个任务中排名第一，这是针对口语对话的任务对话建模的基准，展示了我们提出的TOD-DA的优势和有效性。

本文总结了我们提交第10次对话系统技术挑战（DSTC10）的第二次赛道的任务2的任务2“关于口语对话的知识接地的任务导向对话建模”。类似于前一年的迭代，任务由三个子任务组成：检测转弯是否是知识寻求，选择相关知识文档并最终生成接地响应。今年，焦点在于将系统适应嘈杂的ASR成绩单。我们探讨了不同的方法，使模型对这种类型的输入更加强大，并使生成的响应适应口语对话的风格。对于后者，我们通过嘈杂的频道模型获得最佳效果，该模型另外减少了短和通用响应的数量。我们最好的系统在挑战的人类评估中实现了第一级和第三名。

在口语对话中构建强大的对话系统比书面对话更具挑战。在这方面，提出了DSTC10-TRACK2-TASK2，旨在构建以任务为导向的对话（TOD）系统，该系统将非结构化的外部知识结合在口语对话中，从而扩展了DSTC9-TRACK1。本文介绍了我们的系统，其中包含四种高级方法：数据构建，负面抽样，训练后和样式转移。我们首先自动构建大型培训数据，因为DSTC10-TRACK2未发布官方培训集。对于知识选择任务，我们提出了加权负抽样，以更加细粒度训练模型。我们还采用后培训和样式转移来制作响应生成任务，以生成具有与目标响应类似样式的适当响应。在实验中，我们研究了加权负抽样，训练后和样式转移的效果。我们的模型在客观评估中排名16个团队中的7个，在人类评估中排名6。

当在现实世界中以任务为导向的对话系统中实现自然语言（NLG）组件时，不仅需要在训练数据上学习的自然话语，而且还需要适应对话环境（例如，环境中的噪音）听起来）和用户（例如，理解能力水平较低的用户）。受到语言生成任务的强化学习（RL）的最新进展的启发，我们提出了Antor，这是一种通过强化学习来适应以任务为导向对话的自然语言生成的方法。在Antor中，与用户对系统话语的理解相对应的自然语言理解（NLU）模块已纳入RL的目标函数中。如果将NLG的意图正确传达给了NLU，该意图理解了系统的话语，则NLG将获得积极的回报。我们在Multiwoz数据集上进行了实验，并确认Antor可以对语音识别错误和用户的不同词汇水平产生适应性话语。

Spoken language understanding (SLU) tasks have been studied for many decades in the speech research community, but have not received as much attention as lower-level tasks like speech and speaker recognition. In particular, there are not nearly as many SLU task benchmarks, and many of the existing ones use data that is not freely available to all researchers. Recent work has begun to introduce such benchmark datasets for several tasks. In this work, we introduce several new annotated SLU benchmark tasks based on freely available speech data, which complement existing benchmarks and address gaps in the SLU evaluation landscape. We contribute four tasks: question answering and summarization involve inference over longer speech sequences; named entity localization addresses the speech-specific task of locating the targeted content in the signal; dialog act classification identifies the function of a given speech utterance. We follow the blueprint of the Spoken Language Understanding Evaluation (SLUE) benchmark suite. In order to facilitate the development of SLU models that leverage the success of pre-trained speech representations, we will be publishing for each task (i) annotations for a relatively small fine-tuning set, (ii) annotated development and test sets, and (iii) baseline models for easy reproducibility and comparisons. In this work, we present the details of data collection and annotation and the performance of the baseline models. We also perform sensitivity analysis of pipeline models' performance (speech recognizer + text model) to the speech recognition accuracy, using more than 20 state-of-the-art speech recognition models.

Error correction in automatic speech recognition (ASR) aims to correct those incorrect words in sentences generated by ASR models. Since recent ASR models usually have low word error rate (WER), to avoid affecting originally correct tokens, error correction models should only modify incorrect words, and therefore detecting incorrect words is important for error correction. Previous works on error correction either implicitly detect error words through target-source attention or CTC (connectionist temporal classification) loss, or explicitly locate specific deletion/substitution/insertion errors. However, implicit error detection does not provide clear signal about which tokens are incorrect and explicit error detection suffers from low detection accuracy. In this paper, we propose SoftCorrect with a soft error detection mechanism to avoid the limitations of both explicit and implicit error detection. Specifically, we first detect whether a token is correct or not through a probability produced by a dedicatedly designed language model, and then design a constrained CTC loss that only duplicates the detected incorrect tokens to let the decoder focus on the correction of error tokens. Compared with implicit error detection with CTC loss, SoftCorrect provides explicit signal about which words are incorrect and thus does not need to duplicate every token but only incorrect tokens; compared with explicit error detection, SoftCorrect does not detect specific deletion/substitution/insertion errors but just leaves it to CTC loss. Experiments on AISHELL-1 and Aidatatang datasets show that SoftCorrect achieves 26.1% and 9.4% CER reduction respectively, outperforming previous works by a large margin, while still enjoying fast speed of parallel generation.

对话状态跟踪（DST）是对话系统的核心子模块，旨在从系统和用户话语中提取适当的信念状态（域槽值）。大多数先前的研究试图通过增加预训练模型的大小或使用其他功能（例如图形关系）来提高性能。在这项研究中，我们建议使用实体自适应预训练（DSTEA）进行对话状态跟踪，该系统在该系统中，句子中的关键实体受到DST模型的编码者的训练。 DSTEA通过四种方式从输入对话中提取重要实体，然后应用选择性知识掩盖以有效地训练模型。尽管DSTEA仅进行预训练而没有直接向DST模型注入更多知识，但它的性能比Multiwoz 2.0、2.1和2.2上最著名的基准模型更好。 DSTEA的有效性通过有关实体类型和不同自适应设置的各种比较实验得到了验证。

学习高质量的对话表示对于解决各种面向对话的任务至关重要，尤其是考虑到对话系统通常会遇到数据稀缺。在本文中，我们介绍了对话句子嵌入（DSE），这是一种自我监督的对比学习方法，它学习有效的对话表示，适合各种对话任务。 DSE通过连续进行与对比度学习的正面对话的连续对话来从对话中学习。尽管它很简单，但DSE的表现能力比其他对话表示和普遍的句子表示模型要好得多。我们评估DSE的五个下游对话任务，这些任务检查了不同语义粒度的对话表示。几次射击和零射击设置的实验表明，DSE的表现要优于基线。例如，它在6个数据集中的1-Shot意图分类中比最强的无监督基线实现了13％的平均绩效提高。我们还提供了有关模型的好处和局限性的分析。

The goal of building dialogue agents that can converse with humans naturally has been a long-standing dream of researchers since the early days of artificial intelligence. The well-known Turing Test proposed to judge the ultimate validity of an artificial intelligence agent on the indistinguishability of its dialogues from humans'. It should come as no surprise that human-level dialogue systems are very challenging to build. But, while early effort on rule-based systems found limited success, the emergence of deep learning enabled great advance on this topic. In this thesis, we focus on methods that address the numerous issues that have been imposing the gap between artificial conversational agents and human-level interlocutors. These methods were proposed and experimented with in ways that were inspired by general state-of-the-art AI methodologies. But they also targeted the characteristics that dialogue systems possess.

Natural Language Generation (NLG) has improved exponentially in recent years thanks to the development of sequence-to-sequence deep learning technologies such as Transformer-based language models. This advancement has led to more fluent and coherent NLG, leading to improved development in downstream tasks such as abstractive summarization, dialogue generation and data-to-text generation. However, it is also apparent that deep learning based generation is prone to hallucinate unintended text, which degrades the system performance and fails to meet user expectations in many real-world scenarios. To address this issue, many studies have been presented in measuring and mitigating hallucinated texts, but these have never been reviewed in a comprehensive manner before. In this survey, we thus provide a broad overview of the research progress and challenges in the hallucination problem in NLG. The survey is organized into two parts: (1) a general overview of metrics, mitigation methods, and future directions; and (2) an overview of task-specific research progress on hallucinations in the following downstream tasks, namely abstractive summarization, dialogue generation, generative question answering, data-to-text generation, machine translation, and visual-language generation. This survey serves to facilitate collaborative efforts among researchers in tackling the challenge of hallucinated texts in NLG.

预先接受训练的语言模型的最新进展具有显着改善的神经反应生成。但是，现有方法通常将对话背景视为令牌的线性序列，并通过令牌级自我关注学习生成下一个单词。这些令牌级编码阻碍了话语中话语水平一致性的探索。本文介绍了对话贝特，这是一种新的会话响应生成模型，可以增强以前的基于PLM的对话模型。 DialogBert采用分层变压器架构。为了有效地捕捉话语中的话语水平一致性，我们提出了两种培训目标，包括蒙面的话语回归和分布式话语秩序与原始BERT训练相比。在三个多转对谈话数据集上的实验表明，在定量评估方面，我们的方法非常优于BART和Dialogpt等基线。人类评估表明，DialogBert比具有显着利润率的基线产生更加连贯，信息和人类的反应。

Chatbots are expected to be knowledgeable across multiple domains, e.g. for daily chit-chat, exchange of information, and grounding in emotional situations. To effectively measure the quality of such conversational agents, a model-based automatic dialogue evaluation metric (ADEM) is expected to perform well across multiple domains. Despite significant progress, an ADEM that works well in one domain does not necessarily generalize to another. This calls for a dedicated network architecture for domain generalization. To tackle the multi-domain dialogue evaluation task, we propose a Panel of Experts (PoE), a multitask network that consists of a shared transformer encoder and a collection of lightweight adapters. The shared encoder captures the general knowledge of dialogues across domains, while each adapter specializes in one specific domain and serves as a domain expert. To validate the idea, we construct a high-quality multi-domain dialogue dataset leveraging data augmentation and pseudo-labeling. The PoE network is comprehensively assessed on 16 dialogue evaluation datasets spanning a wide range of dialogue domains. It achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of mean Spearman correlation over all the evaluation datasets. It exhibits better zero-shot generalization than existing state-of-the-art ADEMs and the ability to easily adapt to new domains with few-shot transfer learning.

在本文中，我们建议将面向任务导向的对话系统作为纯粹的自然语言生成任务，以便充分利用像GPT-2这样的大规模预训练模型，并简化了复杂的光学化预备。然而，直接应用这种方法严重遭受了通过删除了替代令牌而导致的对话实体不一致，以及在微调期间灾害模型的灾难性遗忘问题，导致表现不令人满意。为了缓解这些问题，我们设计了一种新颖的GPT-Adapter-CopyNet网络，它将轻量级适配器和CopyNet模块包含到GPT-2中，以实现转移学习和对话实体生成的更好性能。在DSTC8轨道1基准和多种数据集上进行的实验结果表明，我们的建议方法显着优于基线模型，在自动和人类评估中具有显着性能。

Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) is the task of automatically detecting and correcting errors in text. The task not only includes the correction of grammatical errors, such as missing prepositions and mismatched subject-verb agreement, but also orthographic and semantic errors, such as misspellings and word choice errors respectively. The field has seen significant progress in the last decade, motivated in part by a series of five shared tasks, which drove the development of rule-based methods, statistical classifiers, statistical machine translation, and finally neural machine translation systems which represent the current dominant state of the art. In this survey paper, we condense the field into a single article and first outline some of the linguistic challenges of the task, introduce the most popular datasets that are available to researchers (for both English and other languages), and summarise the various methods and techniques that have been developed with a particular focus on artificial error generation. We next describe the many different approaches to evaluation as well as concerns surrounding metric reliability, especially in relation to subjective human judgements, before concluding with an overview of recent progress and suggestions for future work and remaining challenges. We hope that this survey will serve as comprehensive resource for researchers who are new to the field or who want to be kept apprised of recent developments.

Causal language modeling (LM) uses word history to predict the next word. BERT, on the other hand, makes use of bi-directional word information in a sentence to predict words at masked positions. While BERT is effective in sequence encoding, it is non-causal by nature and is not designed for sequence generation. In this paper, we propose a novel language model, SUffix REtrieval-Augmented LM (SUREALM), that simulates a bi-directional contextual effect in an autoregressive manner. SUREALM employs an embedding retriever to search for training sentences in a data store that share similar word history during sequence generation. In particular, the suffix portions of the retrieved sentences mimick the "future" context. We evaluated our proposed model on the DSTC9 spoken dialogue corpus and showed promising word perplexity reduction on the validation and test set compared to competitive baselines.

由于最近的自然语言处理的进步，几种作品已经将伯特的预先接受审查的屏蔽语言模型（MLM）应用于语音识别的后校正。然而，现有的预先训练的模型仅考虑语义校正，同时忽略了单词的语音特征。因此，语义后校正将降低性能，因为在中国ASR中同音误差相当常见。在本文中，我们提出了一种集体利用了语境化表示的新方法以及错误与其替换候选人之间的语音信息来缓解中国ASR的错误率。我们对现实世界语音识别数据集的实验结果表明，我们所提出的方法明显地低于基线模型的CER，其利用预先训练的BERT MLM作为校正器。

To alleviate the problem of structured databases' limited coverage, recent task-oriented dialogue systems incorporate external unstructured knowledge to guide the generation of system responses. However, these usually use word or sentence level similarities to detect the relevant knowledge context, which only partially capture the topical level relevance. In this paper, we examine how to better integrate topical information in knowledge grounded task-oriented dialogue and propose ``Topic-Aware Response Generation'' (TARG), an end-to-end response generation model. TARG incorporates multiple topic-aware attention mechanisms to derive the importance weighting scheme over dialogue utterances and external knowledge sources towards a better understanding of the dialogue history. Experimental results indicate that TARG achieves state-of-the-art performance in knowledge selection and response generation, outperforming previous state-of-the-art by 3.2, 3.6, and 4.2 points in EM, F1 and BLEU-4 respectively on Doc2Dial, and performing comparably with previous work on DSTC9; both being knowledge-grounded task-oriented dialogue datasets.

预训练的语言模型在对话任务上取得了长足的进步。但是，这些模型通常在表面对话文本上进行训练，因此被证明在理解对话环境的主要语义含义方面是薄弱的。我们研究抽象含义表示（AMR）作为预训练模型的明确语义知识，以捕获预训练期间对话中的核心语义信息。特别是，我们提出了一个基于语义的前训练框架，该框架通过三个任务来扩展标准的预训练框架（Devlin等，2019）。根据AMR图表示。关于聊天聊天和面向任务的对话的理解的实验表明了我们的模型的优势。据我们所知，我们是第一个利用深层语义表示进行对话预训练的人。

大型基于变压器的预训练的语言模型在各种知识密集的任务上取得了令人印象深刻的表现，并可以在其参数中捕获事实知识。我们认为，考虑到不断增长的知识和资源需求，在模型参数中存储大量知识是亚最佳选择。我们认为，更有效的替代方法是向模型提供对上下文相关的结构化知识的明确访问，并训练它以使用该知识。我们提出了LM核 - 实现这一目标的一般框架 - 允许从外部知识源对语言模型培训的\ textit {解耦}，并允许后者更新而不会影响已经训练的模型。实验结果表明，LM核心获得外部知识，在知识探索任务上的最先进的知识增强语言模型中实现了重要而强大的优于性能。可以有效处理知识更新；并在两个下游任务上表现良好。我们还提出了一个彻底的错误分析，突出了LM核的成功和失败。