Acquisition and Assessment of Semantic Content for the Generation of Elaborateness and Indirectness in Spoken Dialogue Systems

Louisa Pragst, Koichiro Yoshino, Wolfgang Minker, Satoshi Nakamura, Stefan Ultes


Abstract
In a dialogue system, the dialogue manager selects one of several system actions and thereby determines the system’s behaviour. Defining all possible system actions in a dialogue system by hand is a tedious work. While efforts have been made to automatically generate such system actions, those approaches are mostly focused on providing functional system behaviour. Adapting the system behaviour to the user becomes a difficult task due to the limited amount of system actions available. We aim to increase the adaptability of a dialogue system by automatically generating variants of system actions. In this work, we introduce an approach to automatically generate action variants for elaborateness and indirectness. Our proposed algorithm extracts RDF triplets from a knowledge base and rates their relevance to the original system action to find suitable content. We show that the results of our algorithm are mostly perceived similarly to human generated elaborateness and indirectness and can be used to adapt a conversation to the current user and situation. We also discuss where the results of our algorithm are still lacking and how this could be improved: Taking into account the conversation topic as well as the culture of the user is likely to have beneficial effect on the user’s perception.
Anthology ID:
I17-1092
Volume:
Proceedings of the Eighth International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
November
Year:
2017
Address:
Taipei, Taiwan
Editors:
Greg Kondrak, Taro Watanabe
Venue:
IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing
Note:
Pages:
915–925
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/I17-1092
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Louisa Pragst, Koichiro Yoshino, Wolfgang Minker, Satoshi Nakamura, and Stefan Ultes. 2017. Acquisition and Assessment of Semantic Content for the Generation of Elaborateness and Indirectness in Spoken Dialogue Systems. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 915–925, Taipei, Taiwan. Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing.
Cite (Informal):
Acquisition and Assessment of Semantic Content for the Generation of Elaborateness and Indirectness in Spoken Dialogue Systems (Pragst et al., IJCNLP 2017)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/I17-1092.pdf
Note:
 I17-1092.Notes.pdf