Lifelogs are descriptions of experiences that a person had during their life. Lifelogs are created by fusing data from the multitude of digital services, such as online photos, maps, shopping and content streaming services. Question answering over lifelogs can offer personal assistants a critical resource when they try to provide advice in context. However, obtaining answers to questions over lifelogs is beyond the current state of the art of question answering techniques for a variety of reasons, the most pronounced of which is that lifelogs combine free text with some degree of structure such as temporal and geographical information. We create and publicly release TimelineQA, a benchmark for accelerating progress on querying lifelogs. TimelineQA generates lifelogs of imaginary people. The episodes in the lifelog range from major life episodes such as high school graduation to those that occur on a daily basis such as going for a run. We describe a set of experiments on TimelineQA with several state-of-the-art QA models. Our experiments reveal that for atomic queries, an extractive QA system significantly out-performs a state-of-the-art retrieval-augmented QA system. For multi-hop queries involving aggregates, we show that the best result is obtained with a state-of-the-art table QA technique, assuming the ground truth set of episodes for deriving the answer is available.

Conversational agents have come increasingly closer to human competence in open-domain dialogue settings; however, such models can reflect insensitive, hurtful, or entirely incoherent viewpoints that erode a user’s trust in the moral integrity of the system. Moral deviations are difficult to mitigate because moral judgments are not universal, and there may be multiple competing judgments that apply to a situation simultaneously. In this work, we introduce a new resource, not to authoritatively resolve moral ambiguities, but instead to facilitate systematic understanding of the intuitions, values and moral judgments reflected in the utterances of dialogue systems. The Moral Integrity Corpus, MIC, is such a resource, which captures the moral assumptions of 38k prompt-reply pairs, using 99k distinct Rules of Thumb (RoTs). Each RoT reflects a particular moral conviction that can explain why a chatbot’s reply may appear acceptable or problematic. We further organize RoTs with a set of 9 moral and social attributes and benchmark performance for attribute classification. Most importantly, we show that current neural language models can automatically generate new RoTs that reasonably describe previously unseen interactions, but they still struggle with certain scenarios. Our findings suggest that MIC will be a useful resource for understanding and language models’ implicit moral assumptions and flexibly benchmarking the integrity of conversational agents. To download the data, see https://github.com/GT-SALT/mic

Social media plays an increasing role in our communication with friends and family, and in our consumption of entertainment and information. Hence, to design effective ranking functions for posts on social media, it would be useful to predict the affective responses of a post (e.g., whether it is likely to elicit feelings of entertainment, inspiration, or anger). Similar to work on emotion detection (which focuses on the affect of the publisher of the post), the traditional approach to recognizing affective response would involve an expensive investment in human annotation of training data. We create and publicly release CARE DB, a dataset of 230k social media post annotations according to seven affective responses using the Common Affective Response Expression (CARE) method. The CARE method is a means of leveraging the signal that is present in comments that are posted in response to a post, providing high-precision evidence about the affective response to the post without human annotation. Unlike human annotation, the annotation process we describe here can be iterated upon to expand the coverage of the method, particularly for new affective responses. We present experiments that demonstrate that the CARE annotations compare favorably with crowdsourced annotations. Finally, we use CARE DB to train competitive BERT-based models for predicting affective response as well as emotion detection, demonstrating the utility of the dataset for related tasks.