Dialog Acts for Task Driven Embodied Agents

Spandana Gella, Aishwarya Padmakumar, Patrick Lange, Dilek Hakkani-Tur


Abstract
Embodied agents need to be able to interact in natural language – understanding task descriptions and asking appropriate follow up questions to obtain necessary information to be effective at successfully accomplishing tasks for a wide range of users. In this work, we propose a set of dialog acts for modelling such dialogs and annotate the TEACh dataset that includes over 3,000 situated, task oriented conversations (consisting of 39.5k utterances in total) with dialog acts. To our knowledge,TEACh-DA is the first large scale dataset of dialog act annotations for embodied task completion. Furthermore, we demonstrate the use of this annotated dataset in training models for tagging the dialog acts of a given utterance, predicting the dialog act of the next response given a dialog history, and use the dialog acts to guide agent’s non-dialog behaviour. In particular, our experiments on the TEACh Execution from Dialog History task where the model predicts the sequence of low level actions to be executed in the environment for embodied task completion, demonstrate that dialog acts can improve end performance by up to 2 points compared to the system without dialog acts.
Anthology ID:
2022.sigdial-1.13
Volume:
Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
Month:
September
Year:
2022
Address:
Edinburgh, UK
Editors:
Oliver Lemon, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Junyi Jessy Li, Arash Ashrafzadeh, Daniel Hernández Garcia, Malihe Alikhani, David Vandyke, Ondřej Dušek
Venue:
SIGDIAL
SIG:
SIGDIAL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
111–123
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.sigdial-1.13
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.sigdial-1.13
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Spandana Gella, Aishwarya Padmakumar, Patrick Lange, and Dilek Hakkani-Tur. 2022. Dialog Acts for Task Driven Embodied Agents. In Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 111–123, Edinburgh, UK. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Dialog Acts for Task Driven Embodied Agents (Gella et al., SIGDIAL 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.sigdial-1.13.pdf
Video:
 https://youtu.be/YE8cWLaKrTw