Synthesizing Conversations from Unlabeled Documents using Automatic Response Segmentation

Fanyou Wu, Weijie Xu, Chandan Reddy, Srinivasan Sengamedu


Abstract
In this study, we tackle the challenge of inadequate and costly training data that has hindered the development of conversational question answering (ConvQA) systems. Enterprises have a large corpus of diverse internal documents. Instead of relying on a searching engine, a more compelling approach for people to comprehend these documents is to create a dialogue system. In this paper, we propose a robust dialog synthesising method. We learn the segmentation of data for the dialog task instead of using segmenting at sentence boundaries. The synthetic dataset generated by our proposed method achieves superior quality when compared to WikiDialog, as assessed through machine and human evaluations. By employing our inpainted data for ConvQA retrieval system pre-training, we observed a notable improvement in performance across OR-QuAC benchmarks.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.477
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8012–8026
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.477
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-acl.477
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Fanyou Wu, Weijie Xu, Chandan Reddy, and Srinivasan Sengamedu. 2024. Synthesizing Conversations from Unlabeled Documents using Automatic Response Segmentation. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024, pages 8012–8026, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Synthesizing Conversations from Unlabeled Documents using Automatic Response Segmentation (Wu et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/dois-2013-emnlp/2024.findings-acl.477.pdf