activity
20202026
most citedTripPy: A Triple Copy Strategy for Value Independent Neural Dialog State Tracking

16 citations · 60 across the 22 of their papers we have counts for

collaborators

26 papers

cs.CL2026

Leveraging Low-Level Symbolic Competences for Unsupervised Grounding in Hallucination Detection

Renato Vukovic, Hsien-chin Lin, Carel van Niekerk +5

Hallucination-where a language model generates outputs that are factually incorrect or unsupported by the source-is a major challenge for both prompted and fine-tuned language mode…

cs.CL2025

Prompt reinforcing for long-term planning of large language models

Hsien-Chin Lin, Benjamin Matthias Ruppik, Carel van Niekerk +6

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in a wide range of natural language processing tasks and can be adapted through prompting. However, they remain subopt…

cs.CL2025

All Learning Has an Emotional Basis, So Does Task-Oriented Dialogue

Shutong Feng, Hsien-chin Lin, Nurul Lubis +5

Task-oriented dialogue (ToD) systems aim to help users accomplish goals through natural language interaction. Beyond task success, effective ToD systems must also maintain positive…

cs.CL2025

Text-to-SQL Task-oriented Dialogue Ontology Construction

Renato Vukovic, Carel van Niekerk, Michael Heck +5

Large language models (LLMs) are widely used as general-purpose knowledge sources, but they rely on parametric knowledge, limiting explainability and trustworthiness. In task-orien…

cs.CL2024

Learning from Noisy Labels via Self-Taught On-the-Fly Meta Loss Rescaling

Michael Heck, Christian Geishauser, Nurul Lubis +6

Correct labels are indispensable for training effective machine learning models. However, creating high-quality labels is expensive, and even professionally labeled data contains e…

cs.CL2024

Local Topology Measures of Contextual Language Model Latent Spaces With Applications to Dialogue Term Extraction

Benjamin Matthias Ruppik, Michael Heck, Carel van Niekerk +5

A common approach for sequence tagging tasks based on contextual word representations is to train a machine learning classifier directly on these embedding vectors. This approach h…

cs.CL2024

Infusing Emotions into Task-oriented Dialogue Systems: Understanding, Management, and Generation

Shutong Feng, Hsien-chin Lin, Christian Geishauser +6

Emotions are indispensable in human communication, but are often overlooked in task-oriented dialogue (ToD) modelling, where the task success is the primary focus. While existing w…

cs.CL2024

Dialogue Ontology Relation Extraction via Constrained Chain-of-Thought Decoding

Renato Vukovic, David Arps, Carel van Niekerk +4

State-of-the-art task-oriented dialogue systems typically rely on task-specific ontologies for fulfilling user queries. The majority of task-oriented dialogue data, such as custome…

cs.CL2023★ 3 cited

A Confidence-based Acquisition Model for Self-supervised Active Learning and Label Correction

Carel van Niekerk, Christian Geishauser, Michael Heck +6

Supervised neural approaches are hindered by their dependence on large, meticulously annotated datasets, a requirement that is particularly cumbersome for sequential tasks. The qua…

cs.CL2023

From Chatter to Matter: Addressing Critical Steps of Emotion Recognition Learning in Task-oriented Dialogue

Shutong Feng, Nurul Lubis, Benjamin Ruppik +6

Emotion recognition in conversations (ERC) is a crucial task for building human-like conversational agents. While substantial efforts have been devoted to ERC for chit-chat dialogu…

cs.CL2023★ 14 cited

EmoUS: Simulating User Emotions in Task-Oriented Dialogues

Hsien-Chin Lin, Shutong Feng, Christian Geishauser +6

Existing user simulators (USs) for task-oriented dialogue systems only model user behaviour on semantic and natural language levels without considering the user persona and emotion…

cs.CL2023★ 1 cited

ChatGPT for Zero-shot Dialogue State Tracking: A Solution or an Opportunity?

Michael Heck, Nurul Lubis, Benjamin Ruppik +6

Recent research on dialogue state tracking (DST) focuses on methods that allow few- and zero-shot transfer to new domains or schemas. However, performance gains heavily depend on a…

cs.CL2022★ 3 cited

ConvLab-3: A Flexible Dialogue System Toolkit Based on a Unified Data Format

Qi Zhu, Christian Geishauser, Hsien-chin Lin +10

Task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems function as digital assistants, guiding users through various tasks such as booking flights or finding restaurants. Existing toolkits for build…

cs.CL2022

Dialogue Evaluation with Offline Reinforcement Learning

Nurul Lubis, Christian Geishauser, Hsien-Chin Lin +4

Task-oriented dialogue systems aim to fulfill user goals through natural language interactions. They are ideally evaluated with human users, which however is unattainable to do at…

cs.CL2022

GenTUS: Simulating User Behaviour and Language in Task-oriented Dialogues with Generative Transformers

Hsien-Chin Lin, Christian Geishauser, Shutong Feng +4

User simulators (USs) are commonly used to train task-oriented dialogue systems (DSs) via reinforcement learning. The interactions often take place on semantic level for efficiency…

cs.CL2022

Dialogue Term Extraction using Transfer Learning and Topological Data Analysis

Renato Vukovic, Michael Heck, Benjamin Matthias Ruppik +3

Goal oriented dialogue systems were originally designed as a natural language interface to a fixed data-set of entities that users might inquire about, further described by domain,…

cs.CL2022★ 10 cited

Dynamic Dialogue Policy for Continual Reinforcement Learning

Christian Geishauser, Carel van Niekerk, Nurul Lubis +4

Continual learning is one of the key components of human learning and a necessary requirement of artificial intelligence. As dialogue can potentially span infinitely many topics an…

cs.CL2022

Robust Dialogue State Tracking with Weak Supervision and Sparse Data

Michael Heck, Nurul Lubis, Carel van Niekerk +4

Generalising dialogue state tracking (DST) to new data is especially challenging due to the strong reliance on abundant and fine-grained supervision during training. Sample sparsit…

cs.LG2021

What Does The User Want? Information Gain for Hierarchical Dialogue Policy Optimisation

Christian Geishauser, Songbo Hu, Hsien-chin Lin +5

The dialogue management component of a task-oriented dialogue system is typically optimised via reinforcement learning (RL). Optimisation via RL is highly susceptible to sample ine…

cs.CL2021

Uncertainty Measures in Neural Belief Tracking and the Effects on Dialogue Policy Performance

Carel van Niekerk, Andrey Malinin, Christian Geishauser +5

The ability to identify and resolve uncertainty is crucial for the robustness of a dialogue system. Indeed, this has been confirmed empirically on systems that utilise Bayesian app…

cs.CL2021★ 12 cited

EmoWOZ: A Large-Scale Corpus and Labelling Scheme for Emotion Recognition in Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems

Shutong Feng, Nurul Lubis, Christian Geishauser +4

The ability to recognise emotions lends a conversational artificial intelligence a human touch. While emotions in chit-chat dialogues have received substantial attention, emotions…

cs.CL2021

Domain-independent User Simulation with Transformers for Task-oriented Dialogue Systems

Hsien-chin Lin, Nurul Lubis, Songbo Hu +5

Dialogue policy optimisation via reinforcement learning requires a large number of training interactions, which makes learning with real users time consuming and expensive. Many se…

cs.CL2020

Out-of-Task Training for Dialog State Tracking Models

Michael Heck, Carel van Niekerk, Nurul Lubis +4

Dialog state tracking (DST) suffers from severe data sparsity. While many natural language processing (NLP) tasks benefit from transfer learning and multi-task learning, in dialog…

cs.CL2020★ 1 cited

LAVA: Latent Action Spaces via Variational Auto-encoding for Dialogue Policy Optimization

Nurul Lubis, Christian Geishauser, Michael Heck +4

Reinforcement learning (RL) can enable task-oriented dialogue systems to steer the conversation towards successful task completion. In an end-to-end setting, a response can be cons…