TIAGE: A Benchmark for Topic-Shift Aware Dialog Modeling

Huiyuan Xie, Zhenghao Liu, Chenyan Xiong, Zhiyuan Liu, Ann Copestake


Abstract
Human conversations naturally evolve around different topics and fluently move between them. In research on dialog systems, the ability to actively and smoothly transition to new topics is often ignored. In this paper we introduce TIAGE, a new topic-shift aware dialog benchmark constructed utilizing human annotations on topic shifts. Based on TIAGE, we introduce three tasks to investigate different scenarios of topic-shift modeling in dialog settings: topic-shift detection, topic-shift triggered response generation and topic-aware dialog generation. Experiments on these tasks show that the topic-shift signals in TIAGE are useful for topic-shift response generation. On the other hand, dialog systems still struggle to decide when to change topic. This indicates further research is needed in topic-shift aware dialog modeling.
Anthology ID:
2021.findings-emnlp.145
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1684–1690
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.145
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.findings-emnlp.145
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Huiyuan Xie, Zhenghao Liu, Chenyan Xiong, Zhiyuan Liu, and Ann Copestake. 2021. TIAGE: A Benchmark for Topic-Shift Aware Dialog Modeling. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021, pages 1684–1690, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
TIAGE: A Benchmark for Topic-Shift Aware Dialog Modeling (Xie et al., Findings 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.145.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.145.mp4
Data
TIAGE