Interpreting Indirect Answers to Yes-No Questions in Multiple Languages

Zijie Wang, Md Hossain, Shivam Mathur, Terry Melo, Kadir Ozler, Keun Park, Jacob Quintero, MohammadHossein Rezaei, Shreya Shakya, Md Uddin, Eduardo Blanco


Abstract
Yes-no questions expect a yes or no for an answer, but people often skip polar keywords. Instead, they answer with long explanations that must be interpreted. In this paper, we focus on this challenging problem and release new benchmarks in eight languages. We present a distant supervision approach to collect training data, and demonstrate that direct answers (i.e., with polar keywords) are useful to train models to interpret indirect answers (i.e., without polar keywords). We show that monolingual fine-tuning is beneficial if training data can be obtained via distant supervision for the language of interest (5 languages). Additionally, we show that cross-lingual fine-tuning is always beneficial (8 languages).
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.146
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2210–2227
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.146
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.146
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zijie Wang, Md Hossain, Shivam Mathur, Terry Melo, Kadir Ozler, Keun Park, Jacob Quintero, MohammadHossein Rezaei, Shreya Shakya, Md Uddin, and Eduardo Blanco. 2023. Interpreting Indirect Answers to Yes-No Questions in Multiple Languages. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 2210–2227, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Interpreting Indirect Answers to Yes-No Questions in Multiple Languages (Wang et al., Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.146.pdf