Conceptual Pacts for Reference Resolution Using Small, Dynamically Constructed Language Models: A Study in Puzzle Building Dialogues

Julian Hough, Sina Zarrieß, Casey Kennington, David Schlangen, Massimo Poesio


Abstract
Using Brennan and Clark’s theory of a Conceptual Pact, that when interlocutors agree on a name for an object, they are forming a temporary agreement on how to conceptualize that object, we present an extension to a simple reference resolver which simulates this process over time with different conversation pairs. In a puzzle construction domain, we model pacts with small language models for each referent which update during the interaction. When features from these pact models are incorporated into a simple bag-of-words reference resolver, the accuracy increases compared to using a standard pre-trained model. The model performs equally to a competitor using the same data but with exhaustive re-training after each prediction, while also being more transparent, faster and less resource-intensive. We also experiment with reducing the number of training interactions, and can still achieve reference resolution accuracies of over 80% in testing from observing a single previous interaction, over 20% higher than a pre-trained baseline. While this is a limited domain, we argue the model could be applicable to larger real-world applications in human and human-robot interaction and is an interpretable and transparent model.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.327
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
3689–3699
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.327
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Julian Hough, Sina Zarrieß, Casey Kennington, David Schlangen, and Massimo Poesio. 2024. Conceptual Pacts for Reference Resolution Using Small, Dynamically Constructed Language Models: A Study in Puzzle Building Dialogues. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 3689–3699, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Conceptual Pacts for Reference Resolution Using Small, Dynamically Constructed Language Models: A Study in Puzzle Building Dialogues (Hough et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.327.pdf