COLING 2022main8 citations

Semantic-based Pre-training for Dialogue Understanding

Xuefeng Bai, Linfeng Song, Yue Zhang

Abstract

Pre-trained language models have made great progress on dialogue tasks. However, these models are typically trained on surface dialogue text, thus are proven to be weak in understanding the main semantic meaning of a dialogue context. We investigate Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) as explicit semantic knowledge for pre-training models to capture the core semantic information in dialogues during pre-training. In particular, we propose a semantic-based pre-training framework that extends the standard pre-training framework (Devlin et al.,2019) by three tasks for learning 1) core semantic units, 2) semantic relations and 3) the overall semantic representation according to AMR graphs. Experiments on the understanding of both chit-chats and task-oriented dialogues show the superiority of our model. To our knowledge, we are the first to leverage a deep semantic representation for dialogue pre-training.

BibTeX
@inproceedings{bai-etal-2022-semantic,
    title = "Semantic-based Pre-training for Dialogue Understanding",
    author = "Bai, Xuefeng  and
      Song, Linfeng  and
      Zhang, Yue",
    editor = "Calzolari, Nicoletta  and
      Huang, Chu-Ren  and
      Kim, Hansaem  and
      Pustejovsky, James  and
      Wanner, Leo  and
      Choi, Key-Sun  and
      Ryu, Pum-Mo  and
      Chen, Hsin-Hsi  and
      Donatelli, Lucia  and
      Ji, Heng  and
      Kurohashi, Sadao  and
      Paggio, Patrizia  and
      Xue, Nianwen  and
      Kim, Seokhwan  and
      Hahm, Younggyun  and
      He, Zhong  and
      Lee, Tony Kyungil  and
      Santus, Enrico  and
      Bond, Francis  and
      Na, Seung-Hoon",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics",
    month = oct,
    year = "2022",
    address = "Gyeongju, Republic of Korea",
    publisher = "International Committee on Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2022.coling-1.49/",
    pages = "592--607"
}