Indirect User Requests (IURs), such as “It’s cold in here” instead of “Could you please increase the temperature?” are common in human-human task-oriented dialogue and require world knowledge and pragmatic reasoning from the listener. While large language models (LLMs) can handle these requests effectively, smaller models deployed on virtual assistants often struggle due to resource constraints. Moreover, existing task-oriented dialogue benchmarks lack sufficient examples of complex discourse phenomena such as indirectness. To address this, we propose a set of linguistic criteria along with an LLM-based pipeline for generating realistic IURs to test natural language understanding (NLU) and dialogue state tracking (DST) models before deployment in a new domain. We also release IndirectRequests, a dataset of IURs based on the Schema-Guided Dialogue (SGD) corpus, as a comparative testbed for evaluating the performance of smaller models in handling indirect requests.

There has been an increase in popularity of data-driven question answering systems given their recent success. This pa-per explores the possibility of building a tutorial question answering system for Java programming from data sampled from a community-based question answering forum. This paper reports on the creation of a dataset that could support building such a tutorial question answering system and discusses the methodology to create the 106,386 question strong dataset. We investigate how retrieval-based and generative models perform on the given dataset. The work also investigates the usefulness of using hybrid approaches such as combining retrieval-based and generative models. The results indicate that building data-driven tutorial systems using community-based question answering forums holds significant promise.