Ziheng Li, Liu Kang, Feng Xiao, Luxi Xing, Qingyi Si, Zhuoran Li, Weikang Gong, Deqing Yang, Yanghua Xiao, Hongcheng Guo. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

In the realm of natural language processing, the Chinese Spelling Correction (CSC) task poses a significant challenge. Regrettably, the progress in enhancing its performance has been rather restricted, mainly due to the constrained incorporation of knowledge. In prior studies, confusion sets were introduced as supplementary knowledge sources. Nevertheless, these sets were characterized by their small scale and merely functioned as ancillary features. To address this, we propose a knowledge recall and selection network (ReSC). Initially, we deployed four distinct recall methods, successfully attaining an average recall rate exceeding 93%. Notably, for each character, we can recall approximately 150 related characters or words. Subsequently, we propose a Knowledge Selection Algorithm to choose the appropriate characters or words from numerous recall sets. The knowledge selection network is highly efficient, as the F1 score nearly reaches 100%. Extensive experiments have proven that ReSC can inject a substantial amount of entities with an even lower False Positive Rate. This novel network achieves better results across six datasets from ECSpell and SIGHAN.

A critical challenge for open-domain dialogue agents is to generate persona-relevant and consistent responses. Due to the nature of persona sparsity in conversation scenarios, previous persona-based dialogue agents trained with Maximum Likelihood Estimation tend to overlook the given personas and generate responses irrelevant or inconsistent with personas. To address this problem, we propose a two-stage coarse-to-fine persona-aware training framework to improve the persona consistency of a dialogue agent progressively. Specifically, our framework first trains the dialogue agent to answer the constructed persona-aware questions, making it highly sensitive to the personas to generate persona-relevant responses. Then the dialogue agent is further trained with a contrastive learning paradigm by explicitly perceiving the difference between the consistent and the generated inconsistent responses, forcing it to pay more attention to the key persona information to generate consistent responses. By applying our proposed training framework to several representative baseline models, experimental results show significant boosts on both automatic and human evaluation metrics, especially the consistency of generated responses.

Intention, emotion and action are important psychological factors in human activities, which play an important role in the interaction between individuals. How to model the interaction process between individuals by analyzing the relationship of their intentions, emotions, and actions at the cognitive level is challenging. In this paper, we propose a novel cognitive framework of individual interaction. The core of the framework is that individuals achieve interaction through external action driven by their inner intention. Based on this idea, the interactions between individuals can be constructed by establishing relationships between the intention, emotion and action. Furthermore, we conduct analysis on the interaction between individuals and give a reasonable explanation for the predicting results. To verify the effectiveness of the framework, we reconstruct a dataset and propose three tasks as well as the corresponding baseline models, including action abduction, emotion prediction and action generation. The novel framework shows an interesting perspective on mimicking the mental state of human beings in cognitive science.

Motivations, emotions, and actions are inter-related essential factors in human activities. While motivations and emotions have long been considered at the core of exploring how people take actions in human activities, there has been relatively little research supporting analyzing the relationship between human mental states and actions. We present the first study that investigates the viability of modeling motivations, emotions, and actions in language-based human activities, named COMMA (Cognitive Framework of Human Activities). Guided by COMMA, we define three natural language processing tasks (emotion understanding, motivation understanding and conditioned action generation), and build a challenging dataset Hail through automatically extracting samples from Story Commonsense. Experimental results on NLP applications prove the effectiveness of modeling the relationship. Furthermore, our models inspired by COMMA can better reveal the essential relationship among motivations, emotions and actions than existing methods.

Controllable story generation is a challenging task in the field of NLP, which has attracted increasing research interest in recent years. However, most existing works generate a whole story conditioned on the appointed keywords or emotions, ignoring the psychological changes of the protagonist. Inspired by psychology theories, we introduce global psychological state chains, which include the needs and emotions of the protagonists, to help a story generation system create more controllable and well-planned stories. In this paper, we propose a Psychology-guided Controllable Story Generation System (PICS) to generate stories that adhere to the given leading context and desired psychological state chains for the protagonist. Specifically, psychological state trackers are employed to memorize the protagonist’s local psychological states to capture their inner temporal relationships. In addition, psychological state planners are adopted to gain the protagonist’s global psychological states for story planning. Eventually, a psychology controller is designed to integrate the local and global psychological states into the story context representation for composing psychology-guided stories. Automatic and manual evaluations demonstrate that PICS outperforms baselines, and each part of PICS shows effectiveness for writing stories with more consistent psychological changes.

Intention, emotion and action are important elements in human activities. Modeling the interaction process between individuals by analyzing the relationships between these elements is a challenging task. However, previous work mainly focused on modeling intention and emotion independently, and neglected of exploring the mutual relationships between intention and emotion. In this paper, we propose a RelAtion Interaction Network (RAIN), consisting of Intention Relation Module and Emotion Relation Module, to jointly model mutual relationships and explicitly integrate historical intention information. The experiments on the dataset show that our model can take full advantage of the intention, emotion and action between individuals and achieve a remarkable improvement over BERT-style baselines. Qualitative analysis verifies the importance of the mutual interaction between the intention and emotion.

Story Ending Generation (SEG) is a challenging task in natural language generation. Recently, methods based on Pre-trained Language Models (PLM) have achieved great prosperity, which can produce fluent and coherent story endings. However, the pre-training objective of PLM-based methods is unable to model the consistency between story context and ending. The goal of this paper is to adopt contrastive learning to generate endings more consistent with story context, while there are two main challenges in contrastive learning of SEG. First is the negative sampling of wrong endings inconsistent with story contexts. The second challenge is the adaptation of contrastive learning for SEG. To address these two issues, we propose a novel Contrastive Learning framework for Story Ending Generation (CLseg)†, which has two steps: multi-aspect sampling and story-specific contrastive learning. Particularly, for the first issue, we utilize novel multi-aspect sampling mechanisms to obtain wrong endings considering the consistency of order, causality, and sentiment. To solve the second issue, we well-design a story-specific contrastive training strategy that is adapted for SEG. Experiments show that CLseg outperforms baselines and can produce story endings with stronger consistency and rationality.

Emotional support conversation aims at reducing the emotional distress of the help-seeker, which is a new and challenging task. It requires the system to explore the cause of help-seeker's emotional distress and understand their psychological intention to provide supportive responses. However, existing methods mainly focus on the sequential contextual information, ignoring the hierarchical relationships with the global cause and local psychological intention behind conversations, thus leads to a weak ability of emotional support. In this paper, we propose a Global-to-Local Hierarchical Graph Network to capture the multi-source information (global cause, local intentions and dialog history) and model hierarchical relationships between them, which consists of a multi-source encoder, a hierarchical graph reasoner, and a global-guide decoder. Furthermore, a novel training objective is designed to monitor semantic information of the global cause. Experimental results on the emotional support conversation dataset, ESConv, confirm that the proposed GLHG has achieved the state-of-the-art performance on the automatic and human evaluations.

Intention, emotion and action are important psychological factors in human activities, which play an important role in the interaction between individuals. How to model the interaction process between individuals by analyzing the relationship of their intentions, emotions, and actions at the cognitive level is challenging. In this paper, we propose a novel cognitive framework of individual interaction. The core of the framework is that individuals achieve interaction through external action driven by their inner intention. Based on this idea, the interactions between individuals can be constructed by establishing relationships between the intention, emotion and action. Furthermore, we conduct analysis on the interaction between individuals and give a reasonable explanation for the predicting results. To verify the effectiveness of the framework, we reconstruct a dataset and propose three tasks as well as the corresponding baseline models, including action abduction, emotion prediction and action generation. The novel framework shows an interesting perspective on mimicking the mental state of human beings in cognitive science.

End-to-End open-domain dialogue systems suffer from the issues of generating inconsistent and repetitive responses. Existing dialogue models pay attention to unilaterally incorporating personalized knowledge into the dialogue to enhance the quality of generated response. However, they ignore that incorporating the personality-related information from dialogue history into personalized knowledge can boost the subsequent dialogue quality. In this paper, A Knowledge-Conversation Cyclic Utilization Mechanism (KC2UM) is proposed to enhance the dialogue quality. Specifically, A novel cyclic interaction module is designed to iteratively incorporate personalized knowledge into each turn conversation and capture the personality-related conversation information to enhance personalized knowledge semantic representation. We represent the knowledge with semantic and utilization representations to keep track of the personalized knowledge utilization. Experiments on two knowledge-grounded dialogue datasets show that our approach manages to select knowledge more accurately and generates more informative responses.

Task-oriented dialogues have one-to-many property from semantic and syntactic perspectives, with many suitable dialogue acts and syntactic forms for a given post. However, current state-of-the-art task-oriented dialogue systems attempt to improve the quality of dialogues in terms of the most popular metrics (i.e., BLEU and entity F1), measuring the similarity between the generated responses and the human annotations, while the diversity of task-oriented dialogues remains less explored. This paper aims to improve the diversity of task-oriented dialogues from both semantic and syntactic perspectives by proposing a structural causal model to learn the causality composition of the dialogue acts and syntactic forms. Specifically, the disentangled understanding module decouples the dialogue into semantic and syntactic spaces and learns one-to-many property with multiple reference training. Then the casual collaboration generation module is proposed to apply Structural Causal Mechanism (SCM) to learn the causality composition relationship of the semantic and syntactic representations to generate the diverse response. Extensive experiments on the MultiWOZ datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves significantly better diversity than solid competitors.

Prediction calibration devotes to making the model produce correct prediction probability, corresponding with the model's empirical measurement (i.e., the accuracy on benchmark). It plays a crucial role in the Multiple-Choice based Machine Reading Comprehension (MCRC) task. Once the model gives the wrong candidate answer with a high probability, users or downstream applications will not trust the model easily. However, few works pay attention to the prediction calibration of MCRC models. In this paper, we study the prediction calibration of the MCRC models and introduce the self-supervised target label softening (SS-TLS) training method to develop a well-calibrated MRC model while improving its performance. Specifically, the proposed SS-TLS method softens the target label to train the MCRC model instead of the standard cross-entropy objective. It employs the self-supervised confidence signal to monitor the soften scale adaptively at the instance level. Experimental results on several multiple-Choice style MRC datasets illustrate that the proposed method can improve both model prediction calibration and performance.

Passage retrieval is a fundamental task in information retrieval (IR) research, which has drawn much attention recently. In the English field, the availability of large-scale annotated dataset (e.g, MS MARCO) and the emergence of deep pre-trained language models (e.g, BERT) has resulted in a substantial improvement of existing passage retrieval systems. However, in the Chinese field, especially for specific domains, passage retrieval systems are still immature due to quality-annotated dataset being limited by scale. Therefore, in this paper, we present a novel multi-domain Chinese dataset for passage retrieval (Multi-CPR). The dataset is collected from three different domains, including E-commerce, Entertainment video and Medical. Each dataset contains millions of passages and a certain amount of human annotated query-passage related pairs. We implement various representative passage retrieval methods as baselines. We find that the performance of retrieval models trained on dataset from general domain will inevitably decrease on specific domain. Nevertheless, a passage retrieval system built on in-domain annotated dataset can achieve significant improvement, which indeed demonstrates the necessity of domain labeled data for further optimization. We hope the release of the Multi-CPR dataset could benchmark Chinese passage retrieval task in specific domain and also make advances for future studies.

Question answering systems usually use keyword searches to retrieve potential passages related to a question, and then extract the answer from passages with the machine reading comprehension methods. However, many questions tend to be unanswerable in the real world. In this case, it is significant and challenging how the model determines when no answer is supported by the passage and abstains from answering. Most of the existing systems design a simple classifier to determine answerability implicitly without explicitly modeling mutual interaction and relation between the question and passage, leading to the poor performance for determining the unanswerable questions. To tackle this problem, we propose a Multi-Step Co-Interactive Relation Network (MCR-Net) to explicitly model the mutual interaction and locate key clues from coarse to fine by introducing a co-interactive relation module. The co-interactive relation module contains a stack of interaction and fusion blocks to continuously integrate and fuse history-guided and current-query-guided clues in an explicit way. Experiments on the SQuAD 2.0 and DuReader datasets show that our model achieves a remarkable improvement, outperforming the BERT-style baselines in literature. Visualization analysis also verifies the importance of the mutual interaction between the question and passage.

It is prevalent to utilize external knowledge to help machine answer questions that need background commonsense, which faces a problem that unlimited knowledge will transmit noisy and misleading information. Towards the issue of introducing related knowledge, we propose a semantic-driven knowledge-aware QA framework, which controls the knowledge injection in a coarse-to-careful fashion. We devise a tailoring strategy to filter extracted knowledge under monitoring of the coarse semantic of question on the knowledge extraction stage. And we develop a semantic-aware knowledge fetching module that engages structural knowledge information and fuses proper knowledge according to the careful semantic of questions in a hierarchical way. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach promotes the performance on the CommonsenseQA dataset comparing with strong baselines.

Keeping the conversation consistent and avoiding its repetition are two key factors to construct an intelligent multi-turn knowledge-grounded dialogue system. Although some works tend to combine history with external knowledge such as personal background information to boost dialogue quality, they are prone to ignore the fact that incorporating the same knowledge multiple times into the conversation leads to repetition. The main reason is the lack of effective control over the use of knowledge on the conversation level. So we design a history-adaption knowledge incorporation mechanism to build an effective multi-turn dialogue model. Our proposed model addresses repetition by recurrently updating the knowledge from the conversation level and progressively incorporating it into the history step-by-step. And the knowledge-grounded history representation also enhances the conversation consistency. Experimental results show that our proposed model significantly outperforms several retrieval-based models on some benchmark datasets. The human evaluation demonstrates that our model can maintain conversation consistent and reduce conversation repetition.

We propose a novel Bi-directional Cognitive Knowledge Framework (BCKF) for reading comprehension from the perspective of complementary learning systems theory. It aims to simulate two ways of thinking in the brain to answer questions, including reverse thinking and inertial thinking. To validate the effectiveness of our framework, we design a corresponding Bi-directional Cognitive Thinking Network (BCTN) to encode the passage and generate a question (answer) given an answer (question) and decouple the bi-directional knowledge. The model has the ability to reverse reasoning questions which can assist inertial thinking to generate more accurate answers. Competitive improvement is observed in DuReader dataset, confirming our hypothesis that bi-directional knowledge helps the QA task. The novel framework shows an interesting perspective on machine reading comprehension and cognitive science.

As a sequence-to-sequence generation task, neural machine translation (NMT) naturally contains intrinsic uncertainty, where a single sentence in one language has multiple valid counterparts in the other.However, the dominant methods for NMT only observe one of them from the parallel corpora for the model training but have to deal with adequate variations under the same meaning at inference.This leads to a discrepancy of the data distribution between the training and the inference phases.To address this problem, we propose uncertainty-aware semantic augmentation, which explicitly captures the universal semantic information among multiple semantically-equivalent source sentences and enhances the hidden representations with this information for better translations.Extensive experiments on various translation tasks reveal that our approach significantly outperforms the strong baselines and the existing methods.

The dominant neural machine translation (NMT) models that based on the encoder-decoder architecture have recently achieved the state-of-the-art performance. Traditionally, the NMT models only depend on the representations learned during training for mapping a source sentence into the target domain. However, the learned representations often suffer from implicit and inadequately informed properties. In this paper, we propose a novel bilingual topic enhanced NMT (BLTNMT) model to improve translation performance by incorporating bilingual topic knowledge into NMT. Specifically, the bilingual topic knowledge is included into the hidden states of both encoder and decoder, as well as the attention mechanism. With this new setting, the proposed BLT-NMT has access to the background knowledge implied in bilingual topics which is beyond the sequential context, and enables the attention mechanism to attend to topic-level attentions for generating accurate target words during translation. Experimental results show that the proposed model consistently outperforms the traditional RNNsearch and the previous topic-informed NMT on Chinese-English and EnglishGerman translation tasks. We also introduce the bilingual topic knowledge into the newly emerged Transformer base model on English-German translation and achieve a notable improvement.

In this paper, we alleviate the local optimality of back-translation by learning a policy (takes the form of an encoder-decoder and is defined by its parameters) with future rewarding under the reinforcement learning framework, which aims to optimize the global word predictions for unsupervised neural machine translation.To this end, we design a novel reward function to characterize high-quality translations from two aspects: n-gram matching and semantic adequacy.The n-gram matching is defined as an alternative for the discrete BLEU metric, and the semantic adequacy is used to measure the adequacy of conveying the meaning of the source sentence to the target.During training, our model strives for earning higher rewards by learning to produce grammatically more accurate and semantically more adequate translations.Besides, a variational inference network (VIN) is proposed to constrain the corresponding sentences in two languages have the same or similar latent semantic code.On the widely used WMT'14 English-French, WMT'16 English-German and NIST Chineseto-English benchmarks, our models respectively obtain 27.59/27.15,19.65/23.42 and 22.40 BLEU points without using any labeled data, demonstrating consistent improvements over previous unsupervised NMT models.