‘What are you referring to?’ Evaluating the Ability of Multi-Modal Dialogue Models to Process Clarificational Exchanges
Javier Chiyah-Garcia, Alessandro Suglia, Arash Eshghi, Helen Hastie
Abstract
Referential ambiguities arise in dialogue when a referring expression does not uniquely identify the intended referent for the addressee. Addressees usually detect such ambiguities immediately and work with the speaker to repair it using meta-communicative, Clarificational Exchanges (CE): a Clarification Request (CR) and a response. Here, we argue that the ability to generate and respond to CRs imposes specific constraints on the architecture and objective functions of multi-modal, visually grounded dialogue models. We use the SIMMC 2.0 dataset to evaluate the ability of different state-of-the-art model architectures to process CEs, with a metric that probes the contextual updates that arise from them in the model. We find that language-based models are able to encode simple multi-modal semantic information and process some CEs, excelling with those related to the dialogue history, whilst multi-modal models can use additional learning objectives to obtain disentangled object representations, which become crucial to handle complex referential ambiguities across modalities overall.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.sigdial-1.16
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 24th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
- Month:
- September
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Prague, Czechia
- Editors:
- Svetlana Stoyanchev, Shafiq Joty, David Schlangen, Ondrej Dusek, Casey Kennington, Malihe Alikhani
- Venue:
- SIGDIAL
- SIG:
- SIGDIAL
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 175–182
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.sigdial-1.16
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2023.sigdial-1.16
- Cite (ACL):
- Javier Chiyah-Garcia, Alessandro Suglia, Arash Eshghi, and Helen Hastie. 2023. ‘What are you referring to?’ Evaluating the Ability of Multi-Modal Dialogue Models to Process Clarificational Exchanges. In Proceedings of the 24th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 175–182, Prague, Czechia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- ‘What are you referring to?’ Evaluating the Ability of Multi-Modal Dialogue Models to Process Clarificational Exchanges (Chiyah-Garcia et al., SIGDIAL 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/corrections-2024-07/2023.sigdial-1.16.pdf