Papers by Zheng-Yu Niu
Conversational Graph Grounded Policy Learning for Open-Domain Conversation Generation (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing word-level policy models that learn dialog policy and language generation from dialog corpora often lead to degeneration issues where the utterances become ungrammatical or repetitive. |
| Approach: | They propose to represent prior dialog transitions as a graph and learn a CG grounded dialog policy that can foster a more coherent and controllable dialog. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is able to learn dialog policy in open-domain multi-turn conversation. |
The Rise of Darkness: Safety-Utility Trade-Offs in Role-Playing Dialogue Agents (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate their utility in character simulations, but they pose a risk of generating unsafe content. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which dynamically adjusts safety-utility preferences based on the degree of risk coupling and guides the model to generate responses biased toward utility or safety. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves safety metrics while maintaining utility. |
Discovering Dialog Structure Graph for Coherent Dialog Generation (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on dialog structure graphs from open-domain dialogs have limited number of dialog states and can be laborious and costly to annotate manually. |
| Approach: | They propose to use dialog structure graph as a model to discover hierarchical latent dialog states and their transitions from corpus to facilitate dialog management in a RL based dialog system. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can discover meaningful dialog structure graph and significantly improve multi-turn coherence on two benchmark corpora. |
Where to Go for the Holidays: Towards Mixed-Type Dialogs for Clarification of User Goals (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a dialog system posits that users have figured out clear and specific goals . but in many real-world scenarios, users struggle to figure out specific goals by determining all the necessary slots. |
| Approach: | They propose a mixed-type dialog model with a Prompt-based continual learning mechanism . they collect 5k dialog sessions and 168k utterances for 4 dialog types and 5 domains . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model provides user-goal-related knowledge to help figure out clear and specific goals . it can be extended to any specific type by utilizing existing dialog corpora effectively. |
PLATO-XL: Exploring the Large-scale Pre-training of Dialogue Generation (2022.findings-aacl)
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Siqi Bao, Huang He, Fan Wang, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang, Wenquan Wu, Zhihua Wu, Zhen Guo, Hua Lu, Xinxian Huang, Xin Tian, Xinchao Xu, Yingzhan Lin, Zheng-Yu Niu
| Challenge: | Experimental results show PLATO-XL achieves state-of-the-art results across multiple conversational tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to train PLATO-XL models with up to 11 billion parameters, trained on Chinese and English social media conversations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on multiple conversational tasks, verifying its potential as a foundation model of conversational AI. |
CDConv: A Benchmark for Contradiction Detection in Chinese Conversations (2022.emnlp-main)
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Chujie Zheng, Jinfeng Zhou, Yinhe Zheng, Libiao Peng, Zhen Guo, Wenquan Wu, Zheng-Yu Niu, Hua Wu, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for detecting dialogue contradictions are difficult due to contextualization nature of conversations. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for Contradiction Detection in Chinese Conversations . they use automatic conversation generation to simulate common user behaviors . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark simulated the user behaviors that trigger chatbots to make contradictions . the results show that the current state-of-the-art chatbot can be easily goaded into making contradictions. |
Towards Conversational Recommendation over Multi-Type Dialogs (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | In recent years, there has been a significant increase in the work of conversational recommendation due to the rise of voice-based bots. |
| Approach: | They use a Chinese dialog dataset DuRecDial to study conversational recommendation in the context of multi-type dialogs where bots can proactively lead a conversation from a non-recommendation dialog to a recommendation dialog. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset allows to investigate different parts of the overall problem, e.g., how to naturally lead a dialog, how interact with users for recommendation. |
Knowledge Aware Conversation Generation with Explainable Reasoning over Augmented Graphs (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge-based open domain conversation generation models are limited by the use of unstructured knowledge texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge aware chatting machine with three components, an augmented knowledge graph with both triples and texts, knowledge selector, and knowledge aware response generator. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system is more explainable and flexible than state-of-the-art models. |
Long Time No See! Open-Domain Conversation with Long-Term Persona Memory (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing persona dialogue datasets and models can build long-term relationships with humans . however, current open-domain dialogue systems cannot build long relationships with users . |
| Approach: | They propose a long-term memory conversation dataset and a dialogue generation framework with long-Term memory mechanism to extract and continuously update long-time persona memory. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms baselines in terms of long-term dialogue consistency . the proposed system can build long-lasting relationships between humans and bots . |
DuRecDial 2.0: A Bilingual Parallel Corpus for Conversational Recommendation (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing datasets for conversational recommendation are limited to English and Chinese . |
| Approach: | They propose a bilingual parallel human-to-human recommendation dialog dataset . the data item is annotated in two languages, both English and Chinese . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset provides a testbed for future studies of multilingual and cross-lingual conversational recommendation. |
XDailyDialog: A Multilingual Parallel Dialogue Corpus (2023.acl-long)
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Zeming Liu, Ping Nie, Jie Cai, Haifeng Wang, Zheng-Yu Niu, Peng Zhang, Mrinmaya Sachan, Kaiping Peng
| Challenge: | Existing datasets for open-domain dialogue modeling limited to a single language . absence of multilingual datasets hinders development of robust open- domain dialog systems . |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual parallel open-domain dialog dataset to explore multilingual and cross-lingual open- domain dialog. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to explore multilingual and cross-lingual open-domain dialogs in other languages. |
Towards Zero-Shot Persona Dialogue Generation with In-Context Learning (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve persona consistency on high-quality human-labeled persona datasets face high cost and poor scalability. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to improve zero-shot persona consistency via in-context learning by pre-training a persona-augmented dialogue generation model and then using in-constant prompting mechanism to realize zero- shot persona customization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves persona consistency without compromising coherence and informativeness in zero-shot settings. |