Grounding Conversations with Improvised Dialogues

Hyundong Cho, Jonathan May


Abstract
Effective dialogue involves grounding, the process of establishing mutual knowledge that is essential for communication between people. Modern dialogue systems are not explicitly trained to build common ground, and therefore overlook this important aspect of communication. Improvisational theater (improv) intrinsically contains a high proportion of dialogue focused on building common ground, and makes use of the yes-and principle, a strong grounding speech act, to establish coherence and an actionable objective reality. We collect a corpus of more than 26,000 yes-and turns, transcribing them from improv dialogues and extracting them from larger, but more sparsely populated movie script dialogue corpora, via a bootstrapped classifier. We fine-tune chit-chat dialogue systems with our corpus to encourage more grounded, relevant conversation and confirm these findings with human evaluations.
Anthology ID:
2020.acl-main.218
Volume:
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Dan Jurafsky, Joyce Chai, Natalie Schluter, Joel Tetreault
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2398–2413
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.218
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.218
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hyundong Cho and Jonathan May. 2020. Grounding Conversations with Improvised Dialogues. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 2398–2413, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Grounding Conversations with Improvised Dialogues (Cho & May, ACL 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/naacl24-info/2020.acl-main.218.pdf
Dataset:
 2020.acl-main.218.Dataset.zip
Video:
 http://slideslive.com/38928948
Code
 wise-east/spolin
Data
DailyDialogOpenSubtitles