Reference Resolution and New Entities in Exploratory Data Visualization: From Controlled to Unconstrained Interactions with a Conversational Assistant

Abari Bhattacharya, Abhinav Kumar, Barbara Di Eugenio, Roderick Tabalba, Jillian Aurisano, Veronica Grosso, Andrew Johnson, Jason Leigh, Moira Zellner


Abstract
In the context of data visualization, as in other grounded settings, referents are created by the task the agents engage in and are salient because they belong to the shared physical setting. Our focus is on resolving references to visualizations on large displays; crucially, reference resolution is directly involved in the process of creating new entities, namely new visualizations. First, we developed a reference resolution model for a conversational assistant. We trained the assistant on controlled dialogues for data visualizations involving a single user. Second, we ported the conversational assistant including its reference resolution model to a different domain, supporting two users collaborating on a data exploration task. We explore how the new setting affects reference detection and resolution; we compare the performance in the controlled vs unconstrained setting, and discuss the general lessons that we draw from this adaptation.
Anthology ID:
2023.sigdial-1.33
Volume:
Proceedings of the 24th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
Month:
September
Year:
2023
Address:
Prague, Czechia
Editors:
Svetlana Stoyanchev, Shafiq Joty, David Schlangen, Ondrej Dusek, Casey Kennington, Malihe Alikhani
Venue:
SIGDIAL
SIG:
SIGDIAL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
370–380
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.sigdial-1.33
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.sigdial-1.33
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Abari Bhattacharya, Abhinav Kumar, Barbara Di Eugenio, Roderick Tabalba, Jillian Aurisano, Veronica Grosso, Andrew Johnson, Jason Leigh, and Moira Zellner. 2023. Reference Resolution and New Entities in Exploratory Data Visualization: From Controlled to Unconstrained Interactions with a Conversational Assistant. In Proceedings of the 24th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 370–380, Prague, Czechia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Reference Resolution and New Entities in Exploratory Data Visualization: From Controlled to Unconstrained Interactions with a Conversational Assistant (Bhattacharya et al., SIGDIAL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.sigdial-1.33.pdf