Yoonna Jang, Suhyune Son, Jeongwoo Lee, Junyoung Son, Yuna Hur, Jungwoo Lim, Hyeonseok Moon, Kisu Yang, Heuiseok Lim. Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2023.

Humans usually have conversations by making use of prior knowledge about a topic and background information of the people whom they are talking to. However, existing conversational agents and datasets do not consider such comprehensive information, and thus they have a limitation in generating the utterances where the knowledge and persona are fused properly. To address this issue, we introduce a call For Customized conversation (FoCus) dataset where the customized answers are built with the user's persona and Wikipedia knowledge. To evaluate the abilities to make informative and customized utterances of pre-trained language models, we utilize BART and GPT-2 as well as transformer-based models. We assess their generation abilities with automatic scores and conduct human evaluations for qualitative results. We examine whether the model reflects adequate persona and knowledge with our proposed two sub-tasks, persona grounding (PG) and knowledge grounding (KG). Moreover, we show that the utterances of our data are constructed with the proper knowledge and persona through grounding quality assessment.

We propose a deep learning-based foreign language learning platform, named FreeTalky, for people who experience anxiety dealing with foreign languages, by employing a humanoid robot NAO and various deep learning models. A persona-based dialogue system that is embedded in NAO provides an interesting and consistent multi-turn dialogue for users. Also, an grammar error correction system promotes improvement in grammar skills of the users. Thus, our system enables personalized learning based on persona dialogue and facilitates grammar learning of a user using grammar error feedback. Furthermore, we verified whether FreeTalky provides practical help in alleviating xenoglossophobia by replacing the real human in the conversation with a NAO robot, through human evaluation.

CommonsenseQA is a task in which a correct answer is predicted through commonsense reasoning with pre-defined knowledge.Most previous works have aimed to improve the performance with distributed representation without considering the process of predicting the answer from the semantic representation of the question.To shed light upon the semantic interpretation of the question, we propose an AMR-ConceptNet-Pruned (ACP) graph.The ACP graph is pruned from a full integrated graph encompassing Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) graph generated from input questions and an external commonsense knowledge graph, ConceptNet (CN).Then the ACP graph is exploited to interpret the reasoning path as well as to predict the correct answer on the CommonsenseQA task.This paper presents the manner in which the commonsense reasoning process can be interpreted with the relations and concepts provided by the ACP graph.Moreover, ACP-based models are shown to outperform the baselines.