Annotation Inconsistency and Entity Bias in MultiWOZ
Kun Qian, Ahmad Beirami, Zhouhan Lin, Ankita De, Alborz Geramifard, Zhou Yu, Chinnadhurai Sankar
Abstract
MultiWOZ (Budzianowski et al., 2018) is one of the most popular multi-domain taskoriented dialog datasets, containing 10K+ annotated dialogs covering eight domains. It has been widely accepted as a benchmark for various dialog tasks, e.g., dialog state tracking (DST), natural language generation (NLG) and end-to-end (E2E) dialog modeling. In this work, we identify an overlooked issue with dialog state annotation inconsistencies in the dataset, where a slot type is tagged inconsistently across similar dialogs leading to confusion for DST modeling. We propose an automated correction for this issue, which is present in 70% of the dialogs. Additionally, we notice that there is significant entity bias in the dataset (e.g., “cambridge” appears in 50% of the destination cities in the train domain). The entity bias can potentially lead to named entity memorization in generative models, which may go unnoticed as the test set suffers from a similar entity bias as well. We release a new test set with all entities replaced with unseen entities. Finally, we benchmark joint goal accuracy (JGA) of the state-of-theart DST baselines on these modified versions of the data. Our experiments show that the annotation inconsistency corrections lead to 7-10% improvement in JGA. On the other hand, we observe a 29% drop in JGA when models are evaluated on the new test set with unseen entities.- Anthology ID:
- 2021.sigdial-1.35
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2021
- Address:
- Singapore and Online
- Editors:
- Haizhou Li, Gina-Anne Levow, Zhou Yu, Chitralekha Gupta, Berrak Sisman, Siqi Cai, David Vandyke, Nina Dethlefs, Yan Wu, Junyi Jessy Li
- Venue:
- SIGDIAL
- SIG:
- SIGDIAL
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 326–337
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2021.sigdial-1.35
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2021.sigdial-1.35
- Cite (ACL):
- Kun Qian, Ahmad Beirami, Zhouhan Lin, Ankita De, Alborz Geramifard, Zhou Yu, and Chinnadhurai Sankar. 2021. Annotation Inconsistency and Entity Bias in MultiWOZ. In Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 326–337, Singapore and Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Annotation Inconsistency and Entity Bias in MultiWOZ (Qian et al., SIGDIAL 2021)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/bionlp-24-ingestion/2021.sigdial-1.35.pdf