Bridging Information Gaps in Dialogues with Grounded Exchanges Using Knowledge Graphs

Phillip Schneider, Nektarios Machner, Kristiina Jokinen, Florian Matthes


Abstract
Knowledge models are fundamental to dialogue systems for enabling conversational interactions, which require handling domain-specific knowledge. Ensuring effective communication in information-providing conversations entails aligning user understanding with the knowledge available to the system. However, dialogue systems often face challenges arising from semantic inconsistencies in how information is expressed in natural language compared to how it is represented within the system’s internal knowledge. To address this problem, we study the potential of large language models for conversational grounding, a mechanism to bridge information gaps by establishing shared knowledge between dialogue participants. Our approach involves annotating human conversations across five knowledge domains to create a new dialogue corpus called BridgeKG. Through a series of experiments on this dataset, we empirically evaluate the capabilities of large language models in classifying grounding acts and identifying grounded information items within a knowledge graph structure. Our findings offer insights into how these models use in-context learning for conversational grounding tasks and common prediction errors, which we illustrate with examples from challenging dialogues. We discuss how the models handle knowledge graphs as a semantic layer between unstructured dialogue utterances and structured information items.
Anthology ID:
2024.sigdial-1.10
Volume:
Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
Month:
September
Year:
2024
Address:
Kyoto, Japan
Editors:
Tatsuya Kawahara, Vera Demberg, Stefan Ultes, Koji Inoue, Shikib Mehri, David Howcroft, Kazunori Komatani
Venue:
SIGDIAL
SIG:
SIGDIAL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
110–120
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.sigdial-1.10
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Phillip Schneider, Nektarios Machner, Kristiina Jokinen, and Florian Matthes. 2024. Bridging Information Gaps in Dialogues with Grounded Exchanges Using Knowledge Graphs. In Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 110–120, Kyoto, Japan. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Bridging Information Gaps in Dialogues with Grounded Exchanges Using Knowledge Graphs (Schneider et al., SIGDIAL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.sigdial-1.10.pdf