Unlike empathetic dialogues, the system in emotional support conversations (ESC) is expected to not only convey empathy for comforting the help-seeker, but also proactively assist in exploring and addressing their problems during the conversation. In this work, we study the problem of mixed-initiative ESC where the user and system can both take the initiative in leading the conversation. Specifically, we conduct a novel analysis on mixed-initiative ESC systems with a tailor-designed schema that divides utterances into different types with speaker roles and initiative types. Four emotional support metrics are proposed to evaluate the mixed-initiative interactions. The analysis reveals the necessity and challenges of building mixed-initiative ESC systems. In the light of this, we propose a knowledge-enhanced mixed-initiative framework (KEMI) for ESC, which retrieves actual case knowledge from a large-scale mental health knowledge graph for generating mixed-initiative responses. Experimental results on two ESC datasets show the superiority of KEMI in both content-preserving evaluation and mixed initiative related analyses.
Probabilistic counters are well-known tools often used for space-efficient set cardinality estimation. In this paper, we investigate probabilistic counters from the perspective of preserving privacy. We use the standard, rigid differential privacy notion. The intuition is that the probabilistic counters do not reveal too much information about individuals but provide only general information about the population. Therefore, they can be used safely without violating the privacy of individuals. However, it turned out, that providing a precise, formal analysis of the privacy parameters of probabilistic counters is surprisingly difficult and needs advanced techniques and a very careful approach. We demonstrate that probabilistic counters can be used as a privacy protection mechanism without extra randomization. Namely, the inherent randomization from the protocol is sufficient for protecting privacy, even if the probabilistic counter is used multiple times. In particular, we present a specific privacy-preserving data aggregation protocol based on Morris Counter and MaxGeo Counter. Some of the presented results are devoted to counters that have not been investigated so far from the perspective of privacy protection. Another part is an improvement of previous results. We show how our results can be used to perform distributed surveys and compare the properties of counter-based solutions and a standard Laplace method.
Despite their impressive scale, knowledge bases (KBs), such as Wikidata, still contain significant gaps. Language models (LMs) have been proposed as a source for filling these gaps. However, prior works have focused on prominent entities with rich coverage by LMs, neglecting the crucial case of long-tail entities. In this paper, we present a novel method for LM-based-KB completion that is specifically geared for facts about long-tail entities. The method leverages two different LMs in two stages: for candidate retrieval and for candidate verification and disambiguation. To evaluate our method and various baselines, we introduce a novel dataset, called MALT, rooted in Wikidata. Our method outperforms all baselines in F1, with major gains especially in recall.
Along with the increasing availability of health data has come the rise of data-driven models to inform decision-making and policy. These models have the potential to benefit both patients and health care providers but can also exacerbate health inequities. Existing "algorithmic fairness" methods for measuring and correcting model bias fall short of what is needed for health policy in two key ways. First, methods typically focus on a single grouping along which discrimination may occur rather than considering multiple, intersecting groups. Second, in clinical applications, risk prediction is typically used to guide treatment, creating distinct statistical issues that invalidate most existing techniques. We present summary unfairness metrics that build on existing techniques in "counterfactual fairness" to address both challenges. We also develop a complete framework of estimation and inference tools for our metrics, including the unfairness value ("u-value"), used to determine the relative extremity of unfairness, and standard errors and confidence intervals employing an alternative to the standard bootstrap. We demonstrate application of our framework to a COVID-19 risk prediction model deployed in a major Midwestern health system.
Existing fine-grained intensity regulation methods rely on explicit control through predicted emotion probabilities. However, these high-level semantic probabilities are often inaccurate and unsmooth at the phoneme level, leading to bias in learning. Especially when we attempt to mix multiple emotion intensities for specific phonemes, resulting in markedly reduced controllability and naturalness of the synthesis. To address this issue, we propose the CAScaded Explicit and Implicit coNtrol framework (CASEIN), which leverages accurate disentanglement of emotion manifolds from the reference speech to learn the implicit representation at a lower semantic level. This representation bridges the semantical gap between explicit probabilities and the synthesis model, reducing bias in learning. In experiments, our CASEIN surpasses existing methods in both controllability and naturalness. Notably, we are the first to achieve fine-grained control over the mixed intensity of multiple emotions.
Sequential recommendation (SR) is to accurately recommend a list of items for a user based on her current accessed ones. While new-coming users continuously arrive in the real world, one crucial task is to have inductive SR that can produce embeddings of users and items without re-training. Given user-item interactions can be extremely sparse, another critical task is to have transferable SR that can transfer the knowledge derived from one domain with rich data to another domain. In this work, we aim to present the holistic SR that simultaneously accommodates conventional, inductive, and transferable settings. We propose a novel deep learning-based model, Relational Temporal Attentive Graph Neural Networks (RetaGNN), for holistic SR. The main idea of RetaGNN is three-fold. First, to have inductive and transferable capabilities, we train a relational attentive GNN on the local subgraph extracted from a user-item pair, in which the learnable weight matrices are on various relations among users, items, and attributes, rather than nodes or edges. Second, long-term and short-term temporal patterns of user preferences are encoded by a proposed sequential self-attention mechanism. Third, a relation-aware regularization term is devised for better training of RetaGNN. Experiments conducted on MovieLens, Instagram, and Book-Crossing datasets exhibit that RetaGNN can outperform state-of-the-art methods under conventional, inductive, and transferable settings. The derived attention weights also bring model explainability.
Human doctors with well-structured medical knowledge can diagnose a disease merely via a few conversations with patients about symptoms. In contrast, existing knowledge-grounded dialogue systems often require a large number of dialogue instances to learn as they fail to capture the correlations between different diseases and neglect the diagnostic experience shared among them. To address this issue, we propose a more natural and practical paradigm, i.e., low-resource medical dialogue generation, which can transfer the diagnostic experience from source diseases to target ones with a handful of data for adaptation. It is capitalized on a commonsense knowledge graph to characterize the prior disease-symptom relations. Besides, we develop a Graph-Evolving Meta-Learning (GEML) framework that learns to evolve the commonsense graph for reasoning disease-symptom correlations in a new disease, which effectively alleviates the needs of a large number of dialogues. More importantly, by dynamically evolving disease-symptom graphs, GEML also well addresses the real-world challenges that the disease-symptom correlations of each disease may vary or evolve along with more diagnostic cases. Extensive experiment results on the CMDD dataset and our newly-collected Chunyu dataset testify the superiority of our approach over state-of-the-art approaches. Besides, our GEML can generate an enriched dialogue-sensitive knowledge graph in an online manner, which could benefit other tasks grounded on knowledge graph.
The goal of text generation is to make machines express in human language. It is one of the most important yet challenging tasks in natural language processing (NLP). Since 2014, various neural encoder-decoder models pioneered by Seq2Seq have been proposed to achieve the goal by learning to map input text to output text. However, the input text alone often provides limited knowledge to generate the desired output, so the performance of text generation is still far from satisfaction in many real-world scenarios. To address this issue, researchers have considered incorporating various forms of knowledge beyond the input text into the generation models. This research direction is known as knowledge-enhanced text generation. In this survey, we present a comprehensive review of the research on knowledge enhanced text generation over the past five years. The main content includes two parts: (i) general methods and architectures for integrating knowledge into text generation; (ii) specific techniques and applications according to different forms of knowledge data. This survey can have broad audiences, researchers and practitioners, in academia and industry.
Knowledge graph completion aims to predict missing relations between entities in a knowledge graph. While many different methods have been proposed, there is a lack of a unifying framework that would lead to state-of-the-art results. Here we develop PathCon, a knowledge graph completion method that harnesses four novel insights to outperform existing methods. PathCon predicts relations between a pair of entities by: (1) Considering the Relational Context of each entity by capturing the relation types adjacent to the entity and modeled through a novel edge-based message passing scheme; (2) Considering the Relational Paths capturing all paths between the two entities; And, (3) adaptively integrating the Relational Context and Relational Path through a learnable attention mechanism. Importantly, (4) in contrast to conventional node-based representations, PathCon represents context and path only using the relation types, which makes it applicable in an inductive setting. Experimental results on knowledge graph benchmarks as well as our newly proposed dataset show that PathCon outperforms state-of-the-art knowledge graph completion methods by a large margin. Finally, PathCon is able to provide interpretable explanations by identifying relations that provide the context and paths that are important for a given predicted relation.
Generating texts which express complex ideas spanning multiple sentences requires a structured representation of their content (document plan), but these representations are prohibitively expensive to manually produce. In this work, we address the problem of generating coherent multi-sentence texts from the output of an information extraction system, and in particular a knowledge graph. Graphical knowledge representations are ubiquitous in computing, but pose a significant challenge for text generation techniques due to their non-hierarchical nature, collapsing of long-distance dependencies, and structural variety. We introduce a novel graph transforming encoder which can leverage the relational structure of such knowledge graphs without imposing linearization or hierarchical constraints. Incorporated into an encoder-decoder setup, we provide an end-to-end trainable system for graph-to-text generation that we apply to the domain of scientific text. Automatic and human evaluations show that our technique produces more informative texts which exhibit better document structure than competitive encoder-decoder methods.
Online news recommender systems aim to address the information explosion of news and make personalized recommendation for users. In general, news language is highly condensed, full of knowledge entities and common sense. However, existing methods are unaware of such external knowledge and cannot fully discover latent knowledge-level connections among news. The recommended results for a user are consequently limited to simple patterns and cannot be extended reasonably. Moreover, news recommendation also faces the challenges of high time-sensitivity of news and dynamic diversity of users' interests. To solve the above problems, in this paper, we propose a deep knowledge-aware network (DKN) that incorporates knowledge graph representation into news recommendation. DKN is a content-based deep recommendation framework for click-through rate prediction. The key component of DKN is a multi-channel and word-entity-aligned knowledge-aware convolutional neural network (KCNN) that fuses semantic-level and knowledge-level representations of news. KCNN treats words and entities as multiple channels, and explicitly keeps their alignment relationship during convolution. In addition, to address users' diverse interests, we also design an attention module in DKN to dynamically aggregate a user's history with respect to current candidate news. Through extensive experiments on a real online news platform, we demonstrate that DKN achieves substantial gains over state-of-the-art deep recommendation models. We also validate the efficacy of the usage of knowledge in DKN.