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Large pre-trained language models (PLMs) have demonstrated strong performance on natural language understanding (NLU) tasks through fine-tuning. However, fine-tuned models still suffer from overconfident predictions, especially in…

Performance of NLP systems is typically evaluated by collecting a large-scale dataset by means of crowd-sourcing to train a data-driven model and evaluate it on a held-out portion of the data. This approach has been shown to suffer from…

Explainability is a topic of growing importance in NLP. In this work, we provide a unified perspective of explainability as a communication problem between an explainer and a layperson about a classifier's decision. We use this framework to…

Natural language generators (NLGs) for task-oriented dialogue typically take a meaning representation (MR) as input. They are trained end-to-end with a corpus of MR/utterance pairs, where the MRs cover a specific set of dialogue acts and…

Many models in natural language processing define probabilistic distributions over linguistic structures. We argue that (1) the quality of a model' s posterior distribution can and should be directly evaluated, as to whether probabilities…

Natural language generation (NLG) is an essential component of task-oriented dialog systems. Despite the recent success of neural approaches for NLG, they are typically developed in an offline manner for particular domains. To better fit…

Natural language generation (NLG) is a critical component in conversational systems, owing to its role of formulating a correct and natural text response. Traditionally, NLG components have been deployed using template-based solutions.…

Reliable uncertainty estimation is critical for deploying neural networks (NNs) in real-world applications. While existing calibration techniques often rely on post-hoc adjustments or coarse-grained binning methods, they remain limited in…

Emergent multi-agent communication protocols are very different from natural language and not easily interpretable by humans. We find that agents that were initially pretrained to produce natural language can also experience detrimental…

The rapid proliferation of large language models and natural language processing (NLP) applications creates a crucial need for uncertainty quantification to mitigate risks such as hallucinations and to enhance decision-making reliability in…

Learning to respond to voice-text input involves the subject's ability in understanding the phonetic and text based contents and his/her ability to communicate based on his/her experience. The neuro-cognitive facility of the subject has to…

Various natural language processing tasks are structured prediction problems where outputs are constructed with multiple interdependent decisions. Past work has shown that domain knowledge, framed as constraints over the output space, can…

Generative neural conversational systems are generally trained with the objective of minimizing the entropy loss between the training "hard" targets and the predicted logits. Often, performance gains and improved generalization can be…

Subjective tasks in NLP have been mostly relegated to objective standards, where the gold label is decided by taking the majority vote. This obfuscates annotator disagreement and the inherent uncertainty of the label. We argue that…

A robot as a coworker or a cohabitant is becoming mainstream day-by-day with the development of low-cost sophisticated hardware. However, an accompanying software stack that can aid the usability of the robotic hardware remains the…

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is increasingly used as a key ingredient in critical decision-making systems such as resume parsers used in sorting a list of job candidates. NLP systems often ingest large corpora of human text, attempting…

The non-humanlike behaviour of contemporary pre-trained language models (PLMs) is a leading cause undermining their trustworthiness. A striking phenomenon of such faulty behaviours is the generation of inconsistent predictions, which…

Learning intents and slot labels from user utterances is a fundamental step in all spoken language understanding (SLU) and dialog systems. State-of-the-art neural network based methods, after deployment, often suffer from performance…

Designing machine intelligence to converse with a human user necessarily requires an understanding of how humans participate in conversation, and thus conversation modeling is an important task in natural language processing. New…

Sequence generation models are increasingly being used to translate natural language into programs, i.e. to perform executable semantic parsing. The fact that semantic parsing aims to predict programs that can lead to executed actions in…