Interpretation of Implicit Conditions in Database Search Dialogues

Shunya Fukunaga, Hitoshi Nishikawa, Takenobu Tokunaga, Hikaru Yokono, Tetsuro Takahashi


Abstract
Targeting the database search dialogue, we propose to utilise information in the user utterances that do not directly mention the database (DB) field of the backend database system but are useful for constructing database queries. We call this kind of information implicit conditions. Interpreting the implicit conditions enables the dialogue system more natural and efficient in communicating with humans. We formalised the interpretation of the implicit conditions as classifying user utterances into the related DB field while identifying the evidence for that classification at the same time. Introducing this new task is one of the contributions of this paper. We implemented two models for this task: an SVM-based model and an RCNN-based model. Through the evaluation using a corpus of simulated dialogues between a real estate agent and a customer, we found that the SVM-based model showed better performance than the RCNN-based model.
Anthology ID:
C18-1040
Volume:
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
August
Year:
2018
Address:
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
Editors:
Emily M. Bender, Leon Derczynski, Pierre Isabelle
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
477–486
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/C18-1040
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shunya Fukunaga, Hitoshi Nishikawa, Takenobu Tokunaga, Hikaru Yokono, and Tetsuro Takahashi. 2018. Interpretation of Implicit Conditions in Database Search Dialogues. In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 477–486, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Interpretation of Implicit Conditions in Database Search Dialogues (Fukunaga et al., COLING 2018)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-2/C18-1040.pdf
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