ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Dialogue State Tracking with Multi-Level Fusion of Predicted Dialogue States and Conversations (2021)

Most recently proposed approaches in dialogue state tracking (DST) leverage the context and the last dialogue states to track current dialogue states, which are often slot-value pairs. Although the context contains the complete dialogue information, the information is usually indirect and even requires reasoning to obtain. The information in the lastly predicted dialogue states is direct, but when there is a prediction error, the dialogue information from this source will be incomplete or erroneous. In this paper, we propose the Dialogue State Tracking with Multi-Level Fusion of Predicted Dialogue States and Conversations network (FPDSC). This model extracts information of each dialogue turn by modeling interactions among each turn utterance, the corresponding last dialogue states, and dialogue slots. Then the representation of each dialogue turn is aggregated by a hierarchical structure to form the passage information, which is utilized in the current turn of DST. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of the fusion network with 55.03{\%} and 59.07{\%} joint accuracy on MultiWOZ 2.0 and MultiWOZ 2.1 datasets, which reaches the state-of-the-art performance. Furthermore, we conduct the deleted-value and related-slot experiments on MultiWOZ 2.1 to evaluate our model.
Recent Neural Methods on Dialogue State Tracking for Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems: A Survey (2021)

This paper aims at providing a comprehensive overview of recent developments in dialogue state tracking (DST) for task-oriented conversational systems. We introduce the task, the main datasets that have been exploited as well as their evaluation metrics, and we analyze several proposed approaches. We distinguish between static ontology DST models, which predict a fixed set of dialogue states, and dynamic ontology models, which can predict dialogue states even when the ontology changes. We also discuss the model`s ability to track either single or multiple domains and to scale to new domains, both in terms of knowledge transfer and zero-shot learning. We cover a period from 2013 to 2020, showing a significant increase of multiple domain methods, most of them utilizing pre-trained language models.
Scikit-talk: A toolkit for processing real-world conversational speech data (2021)

We present Scikit-talk, an open-source toolkit for processing collections of real-world conversational speech in Python. First of its kind, the toolkit equips those interested in studying or modeling conversations with an easy-to-use interface to build and explore large collections of transcriptions and annotations of talk-in-interaction. Designed for applications in speech processing and Conversational AI, Scikit-talk provides tools to custom-build datasets for tasks such as intent prototyping, dialog flow testing, and conversation design. Its \textit{preprocessor} module comes with several pre-built interfaces for common transcription formats, which aim to make working across multiple data sources more accessible. The \textit{explorer} module provides a collection of tools to explore and analyse this data type via string matching and unsupervised machine learning techniques. Scikit-talk serves as a platform to collect and connect different transcription formats and representations of talk, enabling the user to quickly build multilingual datasets of varying detail and granularity. Thus, the toolkit aims to make working with authentic conversational speech data in Python more accessible and to provide the user with comprehensive options to work with representations of talk in appropriate detail for any downstream task. For the latest updates and information on currently supported languages and language resources, please refer to: \url{https://pypi.org/project/scikit-talk/}
ERICA: An Empathetic Android Companion for Covid-19 Quarantine (2021)

Over the past year, research in various domains, including Natural Language Processing (NLP), has been accelerated to fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, yet such research has just started on dialogue systems. In this paper, we introduce an end-to-end dialogue system which aims to ease the isolation of people under self-quarantine. We conduct a control simulation experiment to assess the effects of the user interface: a web-based virtual agent, Nora vs. the android ERICA via a video call. The experimental results show that the android can offer a more valuable user experience by giving the impression of being more empathetic and engaging in the conversation due to its nonverbal information, such as facial expressions and body gestures.
A multi-party attentive listening robot which stimulates involvement from side participants (2021)

We demonstrate the moderating abilities of a multi-party attentive listening robot system when multiple people are speaking in turns. Our conventional one-on-one attentive listening system generates listener responses such as backchannels, repeats, elaborating questions, and assessments. In this paper, additional robot responses that stimulate a listening user (side participant) to become more involved in the dialogue are proposed. The additional responses elicit assessments and questions from the side participant, making the dialogue more empathetic and lively.
A Cloud-based User-Centered Time-Offset Interaction Application (2021)

Time-offset interaction applications (TOIA) allow simulating conversations with people who have previously recorded relevant video utterances, which are played in response to their interacting user. TOIAs have great potential for preserving cross-generational and cross-cultural histories, online teaching, simulated interviews, etc. Current TOIAs exist in niche contexts involving high production costs. Democratizing TOIA presents different challenges when creating appropriate pre-recordings, designing different user stories, and creating simple online interfaces for experimentation. We open-source TOIA 2.0, a user-centered time-offset interaction application, and make it available for everyone who wants to interact with people`s pre-recordings, or create their pre-recordings.
Telling Stories through Multi-User Dialogue by Modeling Character Relations (2021)

This paper explores character-driven story continuation, in which the story emerges through characters' first- and second-person narration as well as dialogue{---}requiring models to select language that is consistent with a character`s persona and their relationships with other characters while following and advancing the story. We hypothesize that a multi-task model that trains on character dialogue plus character relationship information improves transformer-based story continuation. To this end, we extend the Critical Role Dungeons and Dragons Dataset (Rameshkumar and Bailey, 2020){---}consisting of dialogue transcripts of people collaboratively telling a story while playing the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons{---}with automatically extracted relationships between each pair of interacting characters as well as their personas. A series of ablations lend evidence to our hypothesis, showing that our multi-task model using character relationships improves story continuation accuracy over strong baselines.
Summarizing Behavioral Change Goals from SMS Exchanges to Support Health Coaches (2021)

Regular physical activity is associated with a reduced risk of chronic diseases such as type 2 diabetes and improved mental well-being. Yet, more than half of the US population is insufficiently active. Health coaching has been successful in promoting healthy behaviors. In this paper, we present our work towards assisting health coaches by extracting the physical activity goal the user and coach negotiate via text messages. We show that information captured by dialogue acts can help to improve the goal extraction results. We employ both traditional and transformer-based machine learning models for dialogue acts prediction and find them statistically indistinguishable in performance on our health coaching dataset. Moreover, we discuss the feedback provided by the health coaches when evaluating the correctness of the extracted goal summaries. This work is a step towards building a virtual assistant health coach to promote a healthy lifestyle.
Rare-Class Dialogue Act Tagging for Alzheimer`s Disease Diagnosis (2021)

Alzheimer`s Disease (AD) is associated with many characteristic changes, not only in an individual`s language but also in the interactive patterns observed in dialogue. The most indicative changes of this latter kind tend to be associated with relatively rare dialogue acts (DAs), such as those involved in clarification exchanges and responses to particular kinds of questions. However, most existing work in DA tagging focuses on improving average performance, effectively prioritizing more frequent classes; it thus gives a poor performance on these rarer classes and is not suited for application to AD analysis. In this paper, we investigate tagging specifically for rare class DAs, using a hierarchical BiLSTM model with various ways of incorporating information from previous utterances and DA tags in context. We show that this can give good performance for rare DA classes on both the general Switchboard corpus (SwDA) and an AD-specific conversational dataset, the Carolinas Conversation Collection (CCC); and that the tagger outputs then contribute useful information for distinguishing patients with and without AD
CIDER: Commonsense Inference for Dialogue Explanation and Reasoning (2021)

Commonsense inference to understand and explain human language is a fundamental research problem in natural language processing. Explaining human conversations poses a great challenge as it requires contextual understanding, planning, inference, and several aspects of reasoning including causal, temporal, and commonsense reasoning. In this work, we introduce CIDER {--} a manually curated dataset that contains dyadic dialogue explanations in the form of implicit and explicit knowledge triplets inferred using contextual commonsense inference. Extracting such rich explanations from conversations can be conducive to improving several downstream applications. The annotated triplets are categorized by the type of commonsense knowledge present (e.g., causal, conditional, temporal). We set up three different tasks conditioned on the annotated dataset: Dialogue-level Natural Language Inference, Span Extraction, and Multi-choice Span Selection. Baseline results obtained with transformer-based models reveal that the tasks are difficult, paving the way for promising future research. The dataset and the baseline implementations are publicly available at \url{https://github.com/declare-lab/CIDER}.
Where Are We in Discourse Relation Recognition? (2021)

Discourse parsers recognize the intentional and inferential relationships that organize extended texts. They have had a great influence on a variety of NLP tasks as well as theoretical studies in linguistics and cognitive science. However it is often difficult to achieve good results from current discourse models, largely due to the difficulty of the task, particularly recognizing implicit discourse relations. Recent developments in transformer-based models have shown great promise on these analyses, but challenges still remain. We present a position paper which provides a systematic analysis of the state of the art discourse parsers. We aim to examine the performance of current discourse parsing models via gradual domain shift: within the corpus, on in-domain texts, and on out-of-domain texts, and discuss the differences between the transformer-based models and the previous models in predicting different types of implicit relations both inter- and intra-sentential. We conclude by describing several shortcomings of the existing models and a discussion of how future work should approach this problem.
Annotation Inconsistency and Entity Bias in MultiWOZ (2021)

MultiWOZ (Budzianowski et al., 2018) is one of the most popular multi-domain taskoriented dialog datasets, containing 10K+ annotated dialogs covering eight domains. It has been widely accepted as a benchmark for various dialog tasks, e.g., dialog state tracking (DST), natural language generation (NLG) and end-to-end (E2E) dialog modeling. In this work, we identify an overlooked issue with dialog state annotation inconsistencies in the dataset, where a slot type is tagged inconsistently across similar dialogs leading to confusion for DST modeling. We propose an automated correction for this issue, which is present in 70{\%} of the dialogs. Additionally, we notice that there is significant entity bias in the dataset (e.g., {\textquotedblleft}cambridge{\textquotedblright} appears in 50{\%} of the destination cities in the train domain). The entity bias can potentially lead to named entity memorization in generative models, which may go unnoticed as the test set suffers from a similar entity bias as well. We release a new test set with all entities replaced with unseen entities. Finally, we benchmark joint goal accuracy (JGA) of the state-of-theart DST baselines on these modified versions of the data. Our experiments show that the annotation inconsistency corrections lead to 7-10{\%} improvement in JGA. On the other hand, we observe a 29{\%} drop in JGA when models are evaluated on the new test set with unseen entities.
On the Need for Thoughtful Data Collection for Multi-Party Dialogue: A Survey of Available Corpora and Collection Methods (2021)

We present a comprehensive survey of available corpora for multi-party dialogue. We survey over 300 publications related to multi-party dialogue and catalogue all available corpora in a novel taxonomy. We analyze methods of data collection for multi-party dialogue corpora and identify several lacunae in existing data collection approaches used to collect such dialogue. We present this survey, the first survey to focus exclusively on multi-party dialogue corpora, to motivate research in this area. Through our discussion of existing data collection methods, we identify desiderata and guiding principles for multi-party data collection to contribute further towards advancing this area of dialogue research.
How Should Agents Ask Questions For Situated Learning? An Annotated Dialogue Corpus (2021)

Intelligent agents that are confronted with novel concepts in situated environments will need to ask their human teammates questions to learn about the physical world. To better understand this problem, we need data about asking questions in situated task-based interactions. To this end, we present the Human-Robot Dialogue Learning (HuRDL) Corpus - a novel dialogue corpus collected in an online interactive virtual environment in which human participants play the role of a robot performing a collaborative tool-organization task. We describe the corpus data and a corresponding annotation scheme to offer insight into the form and content of questions that humans ask to facilitate learning in a situated environment. We provide the corpus as an empirically-grounded resource for improving question generation in situated intelligent agents.
How Will I Argue? A Dataset for Evaluating Recommender Systems for Argumentations (2021)

Exchanging arguments is an important part in communication, but we are often flooded with lots of arguments for different positions or are captured in filter bubbles. Tools which can present strong arguments relevant to oneself could help to reduce those problems. To be able to evaluate algorithms which can predict how convincing an argument is, we have collected a dataset with more than 900 arguments and personal attitudes of 600 individuals, which we present in this paper. Based on this data, we suggest three recommender tasks, for which we provide two baseline results from a simple majority classifier and a more complex nearest-neighbor algorithm. Our results suggest that better algorithms can still be developed, and we invite the community to improve on our results.
From Argument Search to Argumentative Dialogue: A Topic-independent Approach to Argument Acquisition for Dialogue Systems (2021)

Despite the remarkable progress in the field of computational argumentation, dialogue systems concerned with argumentative tasks often rely on structured knowledge about arguments and their relations. Since the manual acquisition of these argument structures is highly time-consuming, the corresponding systems are inflexible regarding the topics they can discuss. To address this issue, we propose a combination of argumentative dialogue systems with argument search technology that enables a system to discuss any topic on which the search engine is able to find suitable arguments. Our approach utilizes supervised learning-based relation classification to map the retrieved arguments into a general tree structure for use in dialogue systems. We evaluate the approach with a state of the art search engine and a recently introduced dialogue model in an extensive user study with respect to the dialogue coherence. The results vary between the investigated topics (and hence depend on the quality of the underlying data) but are in some instances surprisingly close to the results achieved with a manually annotated argument structure.
What to Fact-Check: Guiding Check-Worthy Information Detection in News Articles through Argumentative Discourse Structure (2021)

Most existing methods for automatic fact-checking start with a precompiled list of claims to verify. We investigate the understudied problem of determining what statements in news articles are worthy to fact-check. We annotate the argument structure of 95 news articles in the climate change domain that are fact-checked by climate scientists at climatefeedback.org. We release the first multi-layer annotated corpus for both argumentative discourse structure (argument types and relations) and for fact-checked statements in news articles. We discuss the connection between argument structure and check-worthy statements and develop several baseline models for detecting check-worthy statements in the climate change domain. Our preliminary results show that using information about argumentative discourse structure shows slight but statistically significant improvement over a baseline of local discourse structure.
How \textquotedblleftopen\textquotedblright are the conversations with open-domain chatbots? A proposal for Speech Event based evaluation (2021)

Open-domain chatbots are supposed to converse freely with humans without being restricted to a topic, task or domain. However, the boundaries and/or contents of open-domain conversations are not clear. To clarify the boundaries of {\textquotedblleft}openness{\textquotedblright}, we conduct two studies: First, we classify the types of {\textquotedblleft}speech events{\textquotedblright} encountered in a chatbot evaluation data set (i.e., Meena by Google) and find that these conversations mainly cover the {\textquotedblleft}small talk{\textquotedblright} category and exclude the other speech event categories encountered in real life human-human communication. Second, we conduct a small-scale pilot study to generate online conversations covering a wider range of speech event categories between two humans vs. a human and a state-of-the-art chatbot (i.e., Blender by Facebook). A human evaluation of these generated conversations indicates a preference for human-human conversations, since the human-chatbot conversations lack coherence in most speech event categories. Based on these results, we suggest (a) using the term {\textquotedblleft}small talk{\textquotedblright} instead of {\textquotedblleft}open-domain{\textquotedblright} for the current chatbots which are not that {\textquotedblleft}open{\textquotedblright} in terms of conversational abilities yet, and (b) revising the evaluation methods to test the chatbot conversations against other speech events.
Blending Task Success and User Satisfaction: Analysis of Learned Dialogue Behaviour with Multiple Rewards (2021)

Recently, principal reward components for dialogue policy reinforcement learning use task success and user satisfaction independently and neither the resulting learned behaviour has been analysed nor a suitable proper analysis method even existed. In this work, we employ both principal reward components jointly and propose a method to analyse the resulting behaviour through a structured way of probing the learned policy. We show that blending both reward components increases user satisfaction without sacrificing task success in more hostile environments and provide insight about actions chosen by the learned policies.
Diversity as a By-Product: Goal-oriented Language Generation Leads to Linguistic Variation (2021)

The ability for variation in language use is necessary for speakers to achieve their conversational goals, for instance when referring to objects in visual environments. We argue that diversity should not be modelled as an independent objective in dialogue, but should rather be a result or by-product of goal-oriented language generation. Different lines of work in neural language generation investigated decoding methods for generating more diverse utterances, or increasing the informativity through pragmatic reasoning. We connect those lines of work and analyze how pragmatic reasoning during decoding affects the diversity of generated image captions. We find that boosting diversity itself does not result in more pragmatically informative captions, but pragmatic reasoning does increase lexical diversity. Finally, we discuss whether the gain in informativity is achieved in linguistically plausible ways.
DTAFA: Decoupled Training Architecture for Efficient FAQ Retrieval (2021)

Automated Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) retrieval provides an effective procedure to provide prompt responses to natural language based queries, providing an efficient platform for large-scale service-providing companies for presenting readily available information pertaining to customers' questions. We propose DTAFA, a novel multi-lingual FAQ retrieval system that aims at improving the top-1 retrieval accuracy with the least number of parameters. We propose two decoupled deep learning architectures trained for (i) candidate generation via text classification for a user question, and (ii) learning fine-grained semantic similarity between user questions and the FAQ repository for candidate refinement. We validate our system using real-life enterprise data as well as open source dataset. Empirically we show that DTAFA achieves better accuracy compared to existing state-of-the-art while requiring nearly 30{\texttimes} lesser number of training parameters.
Projection of Turn Completion in Incremental Spoken Dialogue Systems (2021)

The ability to take turns in a fluent way (i.e., without long response delays or frequent interruptions) is a fundamental aspect of any spoken dialog system. However, practical speech recognition services typically induce a long response delay, as it takes time before the processing of the user`s utterance is complete. There is a considerable amount of research indicating that humans achieve fast response times by projecting what the interlocutor will say and estimating upcoming turn completions. In this work, we implement this mechanism in an incremental spoken dialog system, by using a language model that generates possible futures to project upcoming completion points. In theory, this could make the system more responsive, while still having access to semantic information not yet processed by the speech recognizer. We conduct a small study which indicates that this is a viable approach for practical dialog systems, and that this is a promising direction for future research.