OTTers: One-turn Topic Transitions for Open-Domain Dialogue

Karin Sevegnani, David M. Howcroft, Ioannis Konstas, Verena Rieser


Abstract
Mixed initiative in open-domain dialogue requires a system to pro-actively introduce new topics. The one-turn topic transition task explores how a system connects two topics in a cooperative and coherent manner. The goal of the task is to generate a “bridging” utterance connecting the new topic to the topic of the previous conversation turn. We are especially interested in commonsense explanations of how a new topic relates to what has been mentioned before. We first collect a new dataset of human one-turn topic transitions, which we callOTTers. We then explore different strategies used by humans when asked to complete such a task, and notice that the use of a bridging utterance to connect the two topics is the approach used the most. We finally show how existing state-of-the-art text generation models can be adapted to this task and examine the performance of these baselines on different splits of the OTTers data.
Anthology ID:
2021.acl-long.194
Volume:
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Chengqing Zong, Fei Xia, Wenjie Li, Roberto Navigli
Venues:
ACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2492–2504
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.194
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.194
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Karin Sevegnani, David M. Howcroft, Ioannis Konstas, and Verena Rieser. 2021. OTTers: One-turn Topic Transitions for Open-Domain Dialogue. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 2492–2504, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
OTTers: One-turn Topic Transitions for Open-Domain Dialogue (Sevegnani et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.194.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.194.mp4
Code
 karinseve/OTTers
Data
OTTersConceptNetTopical-Chat