NLP for Conversational AI

Co-located with EMNLP 2021


Schedule

(Punta Cana Time; UTC-4)


09:00 - 09:10 Opening Remarks

09:10 - 09:40 Invited Talk 1 - Koichiro Yoshino

09:40 - 10:10 Invited Talk 2 - Pascale Fung

10:10 - 10:30 Coffee Break

10:30 - 12:00 Paper Oral Session

12:00 - 13:00 Lunch Break

13:00 - 13:30 Invited Talk 3 - Tsung-Hsien Wen

13:30 - 14:00 Invited Talk 4 - Idan Szpektor

14:00 - 14:20 Coffee Break

14:20 - 14:50 Invited Talk 5 - Mona Diab

14:50 - 16:50 Paper Poster Session

16:50 - 17:00 Closing Remarks

Best Paper Awards

Best Paper:

  • Teach Me What to Say and I Will Learn What to Pick: Unsupervised Knowledge Selection Through Response Generation with Pretrained Generative Models

Ehsan Lotfi, Maxime De Bruyn, Jeska Buhmann and Walter Daelemans

Honorable Mention Papers:

  • XPersona: Evaluating Multilingual Personalized Chatbot

Zhaojiang Lin, Zihan Liu, Genta Indra Winata, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Andrea Madotto, Yejin Bang, Etsuko Ishii and Pascale Fung


  • Using Pause Information for More Accurate Entity Recognition

Sahas Dendukuri, Pooja Chitkara, Joel Ruben Antony Moniz, Xiao Yang, Manos Tsagkias and Stephen Pulman

Paper Oral Session

10:30 - 10:39: On the Robustness of Intent Classification and Slot Labeling in Goal-oriented Dialog Systems to Real-world Noise

Sailik Sengupta, Jason Krone and Saab Mansour


10:39 - 10:48: XPersona: Evaluating Multilingual Personalized Chatbot (honorable mention paper)

Zhaojiang Lin, Zihan Liu, Genta Indra Winata, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Andrea Madotto, Yejin Bang, Etsuko Ishii and Pascale Fung


10:48 - 10:57: Collaborative Data Relabeling for Robust and Diverse Voice Apps Recommendation in Intelligent Personal Assistants

Qian Hu, Thahir Mohamed, Wei Xiao, Zheng Gao, Xibin Gao, Radhika Arava, Xiyao Ma and Mohamed AbdelHady


10:57 - 11:06: PLATO-KAG: Unsupervised Knowledge-Grounded Conversation via Joint Modeling

Xinxian Huang, Huang He, Siqi Bao, Fan Wang, Hua Wu and Haifeng Wang


11:06 - 11:15: Improving Dialogue State Tracking by Joint Slot Modeling

Ting-Rui Chiang and Yi-Ting Yeh


11:15 - 11:24: Personalized Search-based Query Rewrite System for Conversational AI

Eunah Cho, Ziyan Jiang, Jie Hao, Zheng Chen, Saurabh Gupta, Xing Fan and Chenlei Guo


11:24 - 11:33: Investigating Pretrained Language Models for Graph-to-Text Generation

Leonardo F. R. Ribeiro, Martin Schmitt, Hinrich Schütze and Iryna Gurevych


11:33 - 11:42: Using Pause Information for More Accurate Entity Recognition (honorable mention paper)

Sahas Dendukuri, Pooja Chitkara, Joel Ruben Antony Moniz, Xiao Yang, Manos Tsagkias and Stephen Pulman


11:42 - 11:51: Teach Me What to Say and I Will Learn What to Pick:

Unsupervised Knowledge Selection Through Response Generation with Pretrained Generative Models (best paper)

Ehsan Lotfi, Maxime De Bruyn, Jeska Buhmann and Walter Daelemans


11:51 - 12:00: Influence of user personality on dialogue task performance: A case study using a rule-based dialogue system

Ao Guo, Atsumoto Ohashi, Ryu Hirai, Yuya Chiba, Yuiko Tsunomori and Ryuichiro Higashinaka