CueBot: Cue-Controlled Response Generation for Assistive Interaction Usages

Shachi H. Kumar, Hsuan Su, Ramesh Manuvinakurike, Max Pinaroc, Sai Prasad, Saurav Sahay, Lama Nachman


Abstract
Conversational assistants are ubiquitous among the general population, however, these systems have not had an impact on people with disabilities, or speech and language disorders, for whom basic day-to-day communication and social interaction is a huge struggle. Language model technology can play a huge role in empowering these users and help them interact with others with less effort via interaction support. To enable this population, we build a system that can represent them in a social conversation and generate responses that can be controlled by the users using cues/keywords. We build models that can speed up this communication by suggesting relevant cues in the dialog response context. We also introduce a keyword-loss to lexically constrain the model response output. We present automatic and human evaluation of our cue/keyword predictor and the controllable dialog system to show that our models perform significantly better than models without control. Our evaluation and user study shows that keyword-control on end-to-end response generation models is powerful and can enable and empower users with degenerative disorders to carry out their day-to-day communication.
Anthology ID:
2022.slpat-1.9
Volume:
Ninth Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies (SLPAT-2022)
Month:
May
Year:
2022
Address:
Dublin, Ireland
Editors:
Sarah Ebling, Emily Prud’hommeaux, Preethi Vaidyanathan
Venue:
SLPAT
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
66–79
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.slpat-1.9
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.slpat-1.9
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shachi H. Kumar, Hsuan Su, Ramesh Manuvinakurike, Max Pinaroc, Sai Prasad, Saurav Sahay, and Lama Nachman. 2022. CueBot: Cue-Controlled Response Generation for Assistive Interaction Usages. In Ninth Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies (SLPAT-2022), pages 66–79, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
CueBot: Cue-Controlled Response Generation for Assistive Interaction Usages (H. Kumar et al., SLPAT 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.slpat-1.9.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.slpat-1.9.mp4
Data
DailyDialog