Qingfu Zhu


2021

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Neural Stylistic Response Generation with Disentangled Latent Variables
Qingfu Zhu | Wei-Nan Zhang | Ting Liu | William Yang Wang
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Generating open-domain conversational responses in the desired style usually suffers from the lack of parallel data in the style. Meanwhile, using monolingual stylistic data to increase style intensity often leads to the expense of decreasing content relevance. In this paper, we propose to disentangle the content and style in latent space by diluting sentence-level information in style representations. Combining the desired style representation and a response content representation will then obtain a stylistic response. Our approach achieves a higher BERT-based style intensity score and comparable BLEU scores, compared with baselines. Human evaluation results show that our approach significantly improves style intensity and maintains content relevance.

2020

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Counterfactual Off-Policy Training for Neural Dialogue Generation
Qingfu Zhu | Wei-Nan Zhang | Ting Liu | William Yang Wang
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Open-domain dialogue generation suffers from the data insufficiency problem due to the vast size of potential responses. In this paper, we propose to explore potential responses by counterfactual reasoning. Given an observed response, the counterfactual reasoning model automatically infers the outcome of an alternative policy that could have been taken. The resulting counterfactual response synthesized in hindsight is of higher quality than the response synthesized from scratch. Training on the counterfactual responses under the adversarial learning framework helps to explore the high-reward area of the potential response space. An empirical study on the DailyDialog dataset shows that our approach significantly outperforms the HRED model as well as the conventional adversarial learning approaches.

2019

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Retrieval-Enhanced Adversarial Training for Neural Response Generation
Qingfu Zhu | Lei Cui | Wei-Nan Zhang | Furu Wei | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Dialogue systems are usually built on either generation-based or retrieval-based approaches, yet they do not benefit from the advantages of different models. In this paper, we propose a Retrieval-Enhanced Adversarial Training (REAT) method for neural response generation. Distinct from existing approaches, the REAT method leverages an encoder-decoder framework in terms of an adversarial training paradigm, while taking advantage of N-best response candidates from a retrieval-based system to construct the discriminator. An empirical study on a large scale public available benchmark dataset shows that the REAT method significantly outperforms the vanilla Seq2Seq model as well as the conventional adversarial training approach.

2018

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Context-Sensitive Generation of Open-Domain Conversational Responses
Weinan Zhang | Yiming Cui | Yifa Wang | Qingfu Zhu | Lingzhi Li | Lianqiang Zhou | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Despite the success of existing works on single-turn conversation generation, taking the coherence in consideration, human conversing is actually a context-sensitive process. Inspired by the existing studies, this paper proposed the static and dynamic attention based approaches for context-sensitive generation of open-domain conversational responses. Experimental results on two public datasets show that the proposed static attention based approach outperforms all the baselines on automatic and human evaluation.