We consider open-retrieval conversational question answering (OR-CONVQA), an extension of question answering where system responses need to be (i) aware of dialog history and (ii) grounded in documents (or document fragments) retrieved per question. Domain-specific OR-CONVQA training datasets are crucial for real-world applications, but hard to obtain. We propose a pipeline that capitalizes on the abundance of plain text documents in organizations (e.g., product documentation) to automatically produce realistic OR-CONVQA dialogs with annotations. Similarly to real-world humanannotated OR-CONVQA datasets, we generate in-dialog question-answer pairs, self-contained (decontextualized, e.g., no referring expressions) versions of user questions, and propositions (sentences expressing prominent information from the documents) the system responses are grounded in. We show how the synthetic dialogs can be used to train efficient question rewriters that decontextualize user questions, allowing existing dialog-unaware retrievers to be utilized. The retrieved information and the decontextualized question are then passed on to an LLM that generates the system’s response.

In this paper, we describe our submission to SemEval2017 Task 4: Sentiment Analysis in Twitter. Specifically the proposed system participated both to tweet polarity classification (two-, three- and five class) and tweet quantification (two and five-class) tasks.

The SpeDial consortium is sharing two datasets that were used during the SpeDial project. By sharing them with the community we are providing a resource to reduce the duration of cycle of development of new Spoken Dialogue Systems (SDSs). The datasets include audios and several manual annotations, i.e., miscommunication, anger, satisfaction, repetition, gender and task success. The datasets were created with data from real users and cover two different languages: English and Greek. Detectors for miscommunication, anger and gender were trained for both systems. The detectors were particularly accurate in tasks where humans have high annotator agreement such as miscommunication and gender. As expected due to the subjectivity of the task, the anger detector had a less satisfactory performance. Nevertheless, we proved that the automatic detection of situations that can lead to problems in SDSs is possible and can be a promising direction to reduce the duration of SDS’s development cycle.

Starting from the English affective lexicon ANEW (Bradley and Lang, 1999a) we have created the first Greek affective lexicon. It contains human ratings for the three continuous affective dimensions of valence, arousal and dominance for 1034 words. The Greek affective lexicon is compared with affective lexica in English, Spanish and Portuguese. The lexicon is automatically expanded by selecting a small number of manually annotated words to bootstrap the process of estimating affective ratings of unknown words. We experimented with the parameters of the semantic-affective model in order to investigate their impact to its performance, which reaches 85% binary classification accuracy (positive vs. negative ratings). We share the Greek affective lexicon that consists of 1034 words and the automatically expanded Greek affective lexicon that contains 407K words.