There are many settings where it is useful to predict and explain the success or failure of a dialogue. Circumplex theory from psychology models the social orientations (e.g., Warm-Agreeable, Arrogant-Calculating) of conversation participants and can be used to predict and explain the outcome of social interactions. Our work is novel in its systematic application of social orientation tags to modeling conversation outcomes. In this paper, we introduce a new data set of dialogue utterances machine-labeled with social orientation tags. We show that social orientation tags improve task performance, especially in low-resource settings, on both English and Chinese language benchmarks. We also demonstrate how social orientation tags help explain the outcomes of social interactions when used in neural models. Based on these results showing the utility of social orientation tags for dialogue outcome prediction tasks, we release our data sets, code, and models that are fine-tuned to predict social orientation tags on dialogue utterances.

Although Large Language Models (LLMs) are successful in abstractive summarization of short dialogues, summarization of long dialogues remains challenging. To address this challenge, we propose a novel algorithm that processes complete dialogues comprising thousands of tokens into topic-segment-level Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) graphs, which explicitly capture the dialogue structure, highlight salient semantics, and preserve high-level information. We also develop a new text-graph attention to leverage both graph semantics and a pretrained LLM that exploits the text. Finally, we propose an AMR node selection loss used jointly with conventional cross-entropy loss, to create additional training signals that facilitate graph feature encoding and content selection. Experiments show that our system outperforms the state-of-the-art models on multiple long dialogue summarization datasets, especially in low-resource settings, and generalizes well to out-of-domain data.

This paper describes our AMRTVSumm system for the SummScreen datasets in the Automatic Summarization for Creative Writing shared task (Creative-Summ 2022). In order to capture the complicated entity interactions and dialogue structures in transcripts of TV series, we introduce a new Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) (Banarescu et al., 2013), particularly designed to represent individual scenes in an episode. We also propose a new cross-level cross-attention mechanism to incorporate these scene AMRs into a hierarchical encoder-decoder baseline. On both the ForeverDreaming and TVMegaSite datasets of SummScreen, our system consistently outperforms the hierarchical transformer baseline. Compared with the state-of-the-art DialogLM (Zhong et al., 2021), our system still has a lower performance primarily because it is pretrained only on out-of-domain news data, unlike DialogLM, which uses extensive in-domain pretraining on dialogue and TV show data. Overall, our work suggests a promising direction to capture complicated long dialogue structures through graph representations and the need to combine graph representations with powerful pretrained language models.