Abstract
Current models of dialogue mainly focus on utterances within a topically coherent discourse segment, rather than new-topic utterances (NTUs), which begin a new topic not correlating with the content of prior discourse. As a result, these models may sufficiently account for discourse context of task-oriented but not social conversations. We conduct a pilot annotation study of NTUs as a first step towards a model capable of rationalizing conversational coherence in social talk. We start with the naturally occurring social dialogues in the Disco-SPICE corpus, annotated with discourse relations in the Penn Discourse Treebank and Cognitive approach to Coherence Relations frameworks. We first annotate content-based coherence relations that are not available in Disco-SPICE, and then heuristically identify NTUs, which lack a coherence relation to prior discourse. Based on the interaction between NTUs and their discourse context, we construct a classification for NTUs that actually convey certain non-topical coherence in social talk. This classification introduces new sequence-based social intents that traditional taxonomies of speech acts do not capture. The new findings advocates the development of a Bayesian game-theoretic model for social talk.- Anthology ID:
- 2020.acl-srw.17
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2020
- Address:
- Online
- Editors:
- Shruti Rijhwani, Jiangming Liu, Yizhong Wang, Rotem Dror
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 118–133
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-srw.17
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2020.acl-srw.17
- Cite (ACL):
- Alex Luu and Sophia A. Malamud. 2020. Non-Topical Coherence in Social Talk: A Call for Dialogue Model Enrichment. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop, pages 118–133, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Non-Topical Coherence in Social Talk: A Call for Dialogue Model Enrichment (Luu & Malamud, ACL 2020)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2020.acl-srw.17.pdf