Projects

DialoGraph: Incorporating Interpretable Strategy-Graph Networks into Negotiation Dialogues

To successfully negotiate a deal, it is not enough to communicate fluently: pragmatic planning of persuasive negotiation strategies is essential. While modern dialogue agents excel at generating fluent sentences, they still lack pragmatic grounding and cannot reason strategically. We present DialoGraph, a negotiation system that incorporates pragmatic strategies in a negotiation dialogue using graph neural networks. DialoGraph explicitly incorporates dependencies between sequences of strategies to enable improved and interpretable prediction of next optimal strategies, given the dialogue context.

Differentiable Reasoning over a Virtual Knowledge Base

We consider the task of answering complex multi-hop questions using a corpus as a virtual knowledge base (KB). In particular, we describe a neural module, DrKIT, that traverses textual data like a virtual KB, softly following paths of relations between mentions of entities in the corpus. At each step the operation uses a combination of sparse-matrix TFIDF indices and maximum inner product search (MIPS) on a special index of contextual representations.

Closed Domain Entity Recognition and Fraud Detection

Developing models for entity recognition and entity linking for closed domain data. Building classifiers to learn and predict cases of fraud in the insurance domain. Developing machine learning models for fraud detection in a low resource domain

StructSum: Summarization via Structured Representations

Abstractive text summarization aims at compressing the information of a long source document into a rephrased, condensed summary. Despite advances in modeling techniques, abstractive summarization models still suffer from several key challenges: (i) layout bias: they overfit to the style of training corpora; (ii) limited abstractiveness: they are optimized to copying n-grams from the source rather than generating novel abstractive summaries; (iii) lack of transparency: they are not interpretable. In this work, we propose a framework based on document-level structure induction for summarization to address these challenges.

Table to Text Generation

Built a Seq2Seq model for generating biographies of people from Wikipedia Biography Tables. Used alignments between table and text phrases to improve biographies. Results were on par with the previous State of Art models

Definition Generation

One way to test a person’s knowledge of a domain is to ask them to define domain-specific terms. Here, we investigate the task of automatically generating definitions of technical terms by reading text from the technical domain. Specifically, we learn definitions of software entities from a large corpus built from the user forum Stack Overflow. To model definitions, we train a language model and incorporate additional domain-specific information like word-word co-occurrence, and ontological category information.