NUANCED: Natural Utterance Annotation for Nuanced Conversation with Estimated Distributions

Zhiyu Chen, Honglei Liu, Hu Xu, Seungwhan Moon, Hao Zhou, Bing Liu


Abstract
Existing conversational systems are mostly agent-centric, which assumes the user utterances will closely follow the system ontology. However, in real-world scenarios, it is highly desirable that users can speak freely and naturally. In this work, we attempt to build a user-centric dialogue system for conversational recommendation. As there is no clean mapping for a user’s free form utterance to an ontology, we first model the user preferences as estimated distributions over the system ontology and map the user’s utterances to such distributions. Learning such a mapping poses new challenges on reasoning over various types of knowledge, ranging from factoid knowledge, commonsense knowledge to the users’ own situations. To this end, we build a new dataset named NUANCED that focuses on such realistic settings, with 5.1k dialogues, 26k turns of high-quality user responses. We conduct experiments, showing both the usefulness and challenges of our problem setting. We believe NUANCED can serve as a valuable resource to push existing research from the agent-centric system to the user-centric system. The code and data are publicly available.
Anthology ID:
2021.findings-emnlp.337
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:
4016–4024
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.337
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.findings-emnlp.337
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhiyu Chen, Honglei Liu, Hu Xu, Seungwhan Moon, Hao Zhou, and Bing Liu. 2021. NUANCED: Natural Utterance Annotation for Nuanced Conversation with Estimated Distributions. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021, pages 4016–4024, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
NUANCED: Natural Utterance Annotation for Nuanced Conversation with Estimated Distributions (Chen et al., Findings 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.337.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.337.mp4
Code
 facebookresearch/nuanced