Dialogue Act and Slot Recognition in Italian Complex Dialogues

Irene Sucameli, Michele De Quattro, Arash Eshghi, Alessandro Suglia, Maria Simi


Abstract
Since the advent of Transformer-based, pretrained language models (LM) such as BERT, Natural Language Understanding (NLU) components in the form of Dialogue Act Recognition (DAR) and Slot Recognition (SR) for dialogue systems have become both more accurate and easier to create for specific application domains. Unsurprisingly however, much of this progress has been limited to the English language, due to the existence of very large datasets in both dialogue and written form, while only few corpora are available for lower resourced languages like Italian. In this paper, we present JILDA 2.0, an enhanced version of a Italian task-oriented dialogue dataset, using it to realise a Italian NLU baseline by evaluating three of the most recent pretrained LMs: Italian BERT, Multilingual BERT, and AlBERTo for the DAR and SR tasks. Thus, this paper not only presents an updated version of a dataset characterised by complex dialogues, but it also highlights the challenges that still remain in creating effective NLU components for lower resourced languages, constituting a first step in improving NLU for Italian dialogue.
Anthology ID:
2022.eurali-1.8
Volume:
Proceedings of the Workshop on Resources and Technologies for Indigenous, Endangered and Lesser-resourced Languages in Eurasia within the 13th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
June
Year:
2022
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Atul Kr. Ojha, Sina Ahmadi, Chao-Hong Liu, John P. McCrae
Venue:
EURALI
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
51–60
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.eurali-1.8
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Irene Sucameli, Michele De Quattro, Arash Eshghi, Alessandro Suglia, and Maria Simi. 2022. Dialogue Act and Slot Recognition in Italian Complex Dialogues. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Resources and Technologies for Indigenous, Endangered and Lesser-resourced Languages in Eurasia within the 13th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 51–60, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Dialogue Act and Slot Recognition in Italian Complex Dialogues (Sucameli et al., EURALI 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.eurali-1.8.pdf