Who Is Speaking to Whom? Learning to Identify Utterance Addressee in Multi-Party Conversations

Ran Le, Wenpeng Hu, Mingyue Shang, Zhenjun You, Lidong Bing, Dongyan Zhao, Rui Yan


Abstract
Previous research on dialogue systems generally focuses on the conversation between two participants, yet multi-party conversations which involve more than two participants within one session bring up a more complicated but realistic scenario. In real multi- party conversations, we can observe who is speaking, but the addressee information is not always explicit. In this paper, we aim to tackle the challenge of identifying all the miss- ing addressees in a conversation session. To this end, we introduce a novel who-to-whom (W2W) model which models users and utterances in the session jointly in an interactive way. We conduct experiments on the benchmark Ubuntu Multi-Party Conversation Corpus and the experimental results demonstrate that our model outperforms baselines with consistent improvements.
Anthology ID:
D19-1199
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, Xiaojun Wan
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1909–1919
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1199
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1199
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ran Le, Wenpeng Hu, Mingyue Shang, Zhenjun You, Lidong Bing, Dongyan Zhao, and Rui Yan. 2019. Who Is Speaking to Whom? Learning to Identify Utterance Addressee in Multi-Party Conversations. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 1909–1919, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Who Is Speaking to Whom? Learning to Identify Utterance Addressee in Multi-Party Conversations (Le et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
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