Linguistic ambiguities arising from changes in entities in action flows are a key challenge in instructional cooking videos. In particular, temporally evolving entities present rich and to date understudied challenges for anaphora resolution. For example “oil” mixed with “salt” is later referred to as a “mixture”. In this paper we propose novel annotation guidelines to annotate recipes for the anaphora resolution task, reflecting change in entities. Moreover, we present experimental results for end-to-end multimodal anaphora resolution with the new annotation scheme and propose the use of temporal features for performance improvement.

We describe the system developed by the DFKI-TalkingRobots Team for the CODI-CRAC 2021 Shared-Task on anaphora resolution in dialogue. Our system consists of three subsystems: (1) the Workspace Coreference System (WCS) incrementally clusters mentions using semantic similarity based on embeddings combined with lexical feature heuristics; (2) the Mention-to-Mention (M2M) coreference resolution system pairs same entity mentions; (3) the Discourse Deixis Resolution (DDR) system employs a Siamese Network to detect discourse anaphor-antecedent pairs. WCS achieved F1-score of 55.6% averaged across the evaluation test sets, M2M achieved 57.2% and DDR achieved 21.5%.

We compare our team’s systems to others submitted for the CODI-CRAC 2021 Shared-Task on anaphora resolution in dialogue. We analyse the architectures and performance, report some problematic cases in gold annotations, and suggest possible improvements of the systems, their evaluation, data annotation, and the organization of the shared task.

We investigate frame semantics as a meaning representation framework for team communication in a disaster response scenario. We focus on the automatic frame assignment and retrain PAFIBERT, which is one of the state-of-the-art frame classifiers, on English and German disaster response team communication data, obtaining accuracy around 90%. We examine the performance of both models and discuss their adjustments, such as sampling of additional training instances from an unrelated domain and adding extra lexical and discourse features to input token representations. We show that sampling has some positive effect on the German frame classifier, discuss an unexpected impact of extra features on the models’ behaviour and perform a careful error analysis.

We analyze reference phenomena in a corpus of robot-assisted disaster response team communication. The annotation scheme we designed for this purpose distinguishes different types of entities, roles, reference units and relations. We focus particularly on mission-relevant objects, locations and actors and also annotate a rich set of reference links, including co-reference and various other kinds of relations. We explain the categories used in our annotation, present their distribution in the corpus and discuss challenging cases.

We present the results we obtained on the classification of dialogue acts in a corpus of human-human team communication in the domain of robot-assisted disaster response. We annotated dialogue acts according to the ISO 24617-2 standard scheme and carried out experiments using the FastText linear classifier as well as several neural architectures, including feed-forward, recurrent and convolutional neural models with different types of embeddings, context and attention mechanism. The best performance was achieved with a ”Divide & Merge” architecture presented in the paper, using trainable GloVe embeddings and a structured dialogue history. This model learns from the current utterance and the preceding context separately and then combines the two generated representations. Average accuracy of 10-fold cross-validation is 79.8%, F-score 71.8%.

This paper describes the use of Multi-Task Neural Networks (NNs) for system dialogue act selection. These models leverage the representations learned by the Natural Language Understanding (NLU) unit to enable robust initialization/bootstrapping of dialogue policies from medium sized initial data sets. We evaluate the models on two goal-oriented dialogue corpora in the travel booking domain. Results show the proposed models improve over models trained without knowledge of NLU tasks.

We report on our experience with manual alignment of Czech and English parallel corpus text. We applied existing guidelines for English and French and augmented them to cover systematically occurring cases in our corpus. We describe the main extensions covered in our guidelines and provide examples. We evaluated both intra- and inter-annotator agreement and obtained very good results of Kappa well above 0.9 and agreement of 95% and 93%, respectively.

We describe a corpus of multimodal dialogues with an MP3player collected in Wizard-of-Oz experiments and annotated with a richfeature set at several layers. We are using the Nite XML Toolkit (NXT) to represent and further process the data. We designed an NXTdata model, converted experiment log file data and manualtranscriptions into NXT, and are building tools for additionalannotation using NXT libraries. The annotated corpus will be used to (i) investigate various aspects of multimodal presentation andinteraction strategies both within and across annotation layers; (ii) design an initial policy for reinforcement learning of multimodalclarification requests.

We present a new corpus of tutorial dialogs on mathematical theorem proving that was collected in a Wizard-of-Oz setup. Our study is a follow up on a previous experiment conducted in a similar simulated environment. A major difference between the current and the previous experimental setup was that in this study we varied the presentation of the study-material with which the subjects were provided. One sub-group of the subjects was presented with a highly formalized presentation consisting mainly of formulas, while the other with a presentation mainly in natural language. Our goal was to obtain more data on the kind of mixed-language that is characteristic of informal mathematical discourse. We hypothesized that the language style of the subjects' interaction with the simulated system will reflect the style of presentation of the study-material. In the paper we briefly present the experimental setup, the corpus, and a preliminary quantitative result of the corpus analysis.