The natural language generation (NLG) component of a spoken dialogue system (SDS) usually needs a substantial amount of handcrafting or a well-labeled dataset to be trained on. These limitations add significantly to development costs and make cross-domain, multi-lingual dialogue systems intractable. Moreover, human languages are context-aware. The most natural response should be directly learned from data rather than depending on predefined syntaxes or rules. This paper presents a statistical language generator based on a joint recurrent and convolutional neural network structure which can be trained on dialogue act-utterance pairs without any semantic alignments or predefined grammar trees. Objective metrics suggest that this new model outperforms previous methods under the same experimental conditions. Results of an evaluation by human judges indicate that it produces not only high quality but linguistically varied utterances which are preferred compared to n-gram and rule-based systems.
Statistical approaches have also been studied for sentence planning, for example, generating the most likely context-free derivations given a corpus @cite_30 or maximising the expected reward using reinforcement learning @cite_24 . train a set of log-linear models to predict individual generation decisions given the previous ones, using only domain-independent features. Along similar lines, by casting NLG as a template extraction and reranking problem, show that outputs produced by an SVM reranker are comparable to human-authored texts.
@cite_30 @cite_24
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This article considers approaches which rerank the output of an existing probabilistic parser. The base parser produces a set of candidate parses for each input sentence, with associated probabilities that define an initial ranking of these parses. A second model then attempts to improve upon this initial ranking, using additional features of the tree as evidence. The strength of our approach is that it allows a tree to be represented as an arbitrary set of features, without concerns about how these features interact or overlap and without the need to define a derivation or a generative model which takes these features into account. We introduce a new method for the reranking task, based on the boosting approach to ranking problems described in (1998). We apply the boosting method to parsing the Wall Street Journal treebank. The method combined the log-likelihood under a baseline model (that of Collins [1999]) with evidence from an additional 500,000 features over parse trees that were not included in the original model. The new model achieved 89.75 F-measure, a 13 relative decrease in F measure error over the baseline model's score of 88.2 . The article also introduces a new algorithm for the boosting approach which takes advantage of the sparsity of the feature space in the parsing data. Experiments show significant efficiency gains for the new algorithm over the obvious implementation of the boosting approach. We argue that the method is an appealing alternative—in terms of both simplicity and efficiency—to work on feature selection methods within log-linear (maximum-entropy) models. Although the experiments in this article are on natural language parsing (NLP), the approach should be applicable to many other NLP problems which are naturally framed as ranking tasks, for example, speech recognition, machine translation, or natural language generation. Most previous work on trainable language generation has focused on two paradigms: (a) using a generation decisions of an existing generator. Both approaches rely on the existence of a handcrafted generation component, which is likely to limit their scalability to new domains. The first contribution of this article is to present Bagel, a fully data-driven generation method that treats the language generation task as a search for the most likely sequence of semantic concepts and realization phrases, according to Factored Language Models (FLMs). As domain utterances are not readily available for most natural language generation tasks, a large creative effort is required to produce the data necessary to represent human linguistic variation for nontrivial domains. This article is based on the assumption that learning to produce paraphrases can be facilitated by collecting data from a large sample of untrained annotators using crowdsourcing—rather than a few domain experts—by relying on a coarse meaning representation. A second contribution of this article is to use crowdsourced data to show how dialogue naturalness can be improved by learning to vary the output utterances generated for a given semantic input. Two data-driven methods for generating paraphrases in dialogue are presented: (a) by sampling from the n-best list of realizations produced by Bagel's FLM reranker; and (b) by learning a structured perceptron predicting whether candidate realizations are valid paraphrases. We train Bagel on a set of 1,956 utterances produced by 137 annotators, which covers 10 types of dialogue acts and 128 semantic concepts in a tourist information system for Cambridge. An automated evaluation shows that Bagel outperforms utterance class LM baselines on this domain. A human evaluation of 600 resynthesized dialogue extracts shows that Bagel's FLM output produces utterances comparable to a handcrafted baseline, whereas the perceptron classifier performs worse. Interestingly, human judges find the system sampling from the n-best list to be more natural than a system always returning the first-best utterance. The judges are also more willing to interact with the n-best system in the future. These results suggest that capturing the large variation found in human language using data-driven methods is beneficial for dialogue interaction. In part of speech tagging by Hidden Markov Model, a statistical model is used to assign grammatical categories to words in a text. Early work in the field relied on a corpus which had been tagged by a human annotator to train the model. More recently, (1992) suggest that training can be achieved with a minimal lexicon and a limited amount of a priori information about probabilities, by using an Baum-Welch re-estimation to automatically refine the model. In this paper, I report two experiments designed to determine how much manual training information is needed. The first experiment suggests that initial biasing of either lexical or transition probabilities is essential to achieve a good accuracy. The second experiment reveals that there are three distinct patterns of Baum-Welch reestimation. In two of the patterns, the re-estimation ultimately reduces the accuracy of the tagging rather than improving it. The pattern which is applicable can be predicted from the quality of the initial model and the similarity between the tagged training corpus (if any) and the corpus to be tagged. Heuristics for deciding how to use re-estimation in an effective manner are given. The conclusions are broadly in agreement with those of Merialdo (1994), but give greater detail about the contributions of different parts of the model. Natural Language Generation (NLG) is the task of automatically producing natural language text to describe information present in non-linguistic data. It involves three main subtasks: (i) selecting the relevant portion of input data; (ii) determining the words that will be used to verbalise the selected data; and (iii) mapping these words into natural language text. The latter task is known as Surface Realisation (SR). In my thesis, I study the SR task in the context of input data coming from Knowledge Bases (KB). I present two novel approaches to surface realisation from knowledge bases: a supervised approach and a weakly supervised approach. In the first, supervised, approach, I present a corpus-based method for inducing a Feature Based Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar (FB-LTAG) from a parallel corpus of text and data. The resulting grammar includes a unification based semantics and can be used by an existing surface realiser to generate sentences from test data. I show that the induced grammar is compact and generalises well over the test data yielding results that are close to those produced by a handcrafted symbolic approach and which outperform an alternative statistical approach. In the weakly supervised approach, I explore a method for surface realisation from KB data which uses a supplied lexicon but does not require a parallel corpus. Instead, I build a corpus from heterogeneous sources of domain-related text and use it to identify possible lexicalisations of KB symbols (classes and relations) and their verbalisation patterns (frames). Based on the observations made, I build different probabilistic models which are used for selection of appropriate frames and syntax semantics linking while verbalising KB inputs. I evaluate the output sentences and analyse the issues relevant to learning from non-parallel corpora. In both these approaches, I use the data derived from an existing biomedical ontology as a reference input. The proposed methods are generic and can be easily adapted for input from other ontologies for which a parallel non-parallel corpora exists.