Often both an utterance and its context must be read to understand its intent in a dialog. Herein we propose a task, Self- Contained Utterance Description (SCUD), to describe the intent of an utterance in a dialog with multiple simple natural sentences without the context. If a task can be performed concurrently with high accuracy as the conversation continues such as in an accommodation search dialog, the operator can easily suggest candidates to the customer by inputting SCUDs of the customer’s utterances to the accommodation search system. SCUDs can also describe the transition of customer requests from the dialog log. We construct a Japanese corpus to train and evaluate automatic SCUD generation. The corpus consists of 210 dialogs containing 10,814 sentences. We conduct an experiment to verify that SCUDs can be automatically generated. Additionally, we investigate the influence of the amount of training data on the automatic generation performance using 8,200 additional examples.

Explainable recommendation is a good way to improve user satisfaction. However, explainable recommendation in dialogue is challenging since it has to handle natural language as both input and output. To tackle the challenge, this paper proposes a novel and practical task to explain evidences in recommending hotels given vague requests expressed freely in natural language. We decompose the process into two subtasks on hotel reviews: Evidence Identification and Evidence Explanation. The former predicts whether or not a sentence contains evidence that expresses why a given request is satisfied. The latter generates a recommendation sentence given a request and an evidence sentence. In order to address these subtasks, we build an Evidence-based Explanation dataset, which is the largest dataset for explaining evidences in recommending hotels for vague requests. The experimental results demonstrate that the BERT model can find evidence sentences with respect to various vague requests and that the LSTM-based model can generate recommendation sentences.

For NLP, sentence boundary detection (SBD) is an essential task to decompose a text into sentences. Most of the previous studies have used a simple rule that uses only typical characters as sentence boundaries. However, some characters may or may not be sentence boundaries depending on the context. We focused on line breaks in them. We newly constructed annotated corpora, implemented sentence boundary detectors, and analyzed performance of SBD in several settings.

We perform the textual entailment (TE) corpus construction for the Japanese Language with the following three characteristics: First, the corpus consists of realistic sentences; that is, all sentences are spontaneous or almost equivalent. It does not need manual writing which causes hidden biases. Second, the corpus contains adversarial examples. We collect challenging examples that can not be solved by a recent pre-trained language model. Third, the corpus contains explanations for a part of non-entailment labels. We perform the reasoning annotation where annotators are asked to check which tokens in hypotheses are the reason why the relations are labeled. It makes easy to validate the annotation and analyze system errors. The resulting corpus consists of 48,000 realistic Japanese examples. It is the largest among publicly available Japanese TE corpora. Additionally, it is the first Japanese TE corpus that includes reasons for the annotation as we know. We are planning to distribute this corpus to the NLP community at the time of publication.

This paper presents a joint model for morphological and dependency analysis based on automatically acquired lexical knowledge. This model takes advantage of rich lexical knowledge to simultaneously resolve word segmentation, POS, and dependency ambiguities. In our experiments on Japanese, we show the effectiveness of our joint model over conventional pipeline models.