Situated and Interactive Multimodal Conversations

Seungwhan Moon, Satwik Kottur, Paul Crook, Ankita De, Shivani Poddar, Theodore Levin, David Whitney, Daniel Difranco, Ahmad Beirami, Eunjoon Cho, Rajen Subba, Alborz Geramifard


Abstract
Next generation virtual assistants are envisioned to handle multimodal inputs (e.g., vision, memories of previous interactions, and the user’s utterances), and perform multimodal actions (, displaying a route while generating the system’s utterance). We introduce Situated Interactive MultiModal Conversations (SIMMC) as a new direction aimed at training agents that take multimodal actions grounded in a co-evolving multimodal input context in addition to the dialog history. We provide two SIMMC datasets totalling ~13K human-human dialogs (~169K utterances) collected using a multimodal Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ) setup, on two shopping domains: (a) furniture – grounded in a shared virtual environment; and (b) fashion – grounded in an evolving set of images. Datasets include multimodal context of the items appearing in each scene, and contextual NLU, NLG and coreference annotations using a novel and unified framework of SIMMC conversational acts for both user and assistant utterances. Finally, we present several tasks within SIMMC as objective evaluation protocols, such as structural API prediction, response generation, and dialog state tracking. We benchmark a collection of existing models on these SIMMC tasks as strong baselines, and demonstrate rich multimodal conversational interactions. Our data, annotations, and models will be made publicly available.
Anthology ID:
2020.coling-main.96
Volume:
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Barcelona, Spain (Online)
Editors:
Donia Scott, Nuria Bel, Chengqing Zong
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
International Committee on Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1103–1121
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.96
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.coling-main.96
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Seungwhan Moon, Satwik Kottur, Paul Crook, Ankita De, Shivani Poddar, Theodore Levin, David Whitney, Daniel Difranco, Ahmad Beirami, Eunjoon Cho, Rajen Subba, and Alborz Geramifard. 2020. Situated and Interactive Multimodal Conversations. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 1103–1121, Barcelona, Spain (Online). International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Situated and Interactive Multimodal Conversations (Moon et al., COLING 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.96.pdf
Code
 facebookresearch/simmc +  additional community code
Data
SIMMCVisual Question Answering