DIRECT: Direct and Indirect Responses in Conversational Text Corpus

Junya Takayama, Tomoyuki Kajiwara, Yuki Arase


Abstract
We create a large-scale dialogue corpus that provides pragmatic paraphrases to advance technology for understanding the underlying intentions of users. While neural conversation models acquire the ability to generate fluent responses through training on a dialogue corpus, previous corpora have mainly focused on the literal meanings of utterances. However, in reality, people do not always present their intentions directly. For example, if a person said to the operator of a reservation service “I don’t have enough budget.”, they, in fact, mean “please find a cheaper option for me.” Our corpus provides a total of 71,498 indirect–direct utterance pairs accompanied by a multi-turn dialogue history extracted from the MultiWoZ dataset. In addition, we propose three tasks to benchmark the ability of models to recognize and generate indirect and direct utterances. We also investigated the performance of state-of-the-art pre-trained models as baselines.
Anthology ID:
2021.findings-emnlp.170
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1980–1989
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.170
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.findings-emnlp.170
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Junya Takayama, Tomoyuki Kajiwara, and Yuki Arase. 2021. DIRECT: Direct and Indirect Responses in Conversational Text Corpus. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021, pages 1980–1989, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
DIRECT: Direct and Indirect Responses in Conversational Text Corpus (Takayama et al., Findings 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-3/2021.findings-emnlp.170.pdf
Video:
 https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-3/2021.findings-emnlp.170.mp4
Code
 junya-takayama/direct
Data
MRPCMultiWOZPAWS