NUANCED: Natural Utterance Annotation for Nuanced Conversation with Estimated Distributions
Zhiyu Chen, Honglei Liu, Hu Xu, Seungwhan Moon, Hao Zhou, Bing Liu
Abstract
Existing conversational systems are mostly agent-centric, which assumes the user utterances will closely follow the system ontology. However, in real-world scenarios, it is highly desirable that users can speak freely and naturally. In this work, we attempt to build a user-centric dialogue system for conversational recommendation. As there is no clean mapping for a user’s free form utterance to an ontology, we first model the user preferences as estimated distributions over the system ontology and map the user’s utterances to such distributions. Learning such a mapping poses new challenges on reasoning over various types of knowledge, ranging from factoid knowledge, commonsense knowledge to the users’ own situations. To this end, we build a new dataset named NUANCED that focuses on such realistic settings, with 5.1k dialogues, 26k turns of high-quality user responses. We conduct experiments, showing both the usefulness and challenges of our problem setting. We believe NUANCED can serve as a valuable resource to push existing research from the agent-centric system to the user-centric system. The code and data are publicly available.- Anthology ID:
- 2021.findings-emnlp.337
- 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:
- 4016–4024
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.337
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2021.findings-emnlp.337
- Cite (ACL):
- Zhiyu Chen, Honglei Liu, Hu Xu, Seungwhan Moon, Hao Zhou, and Bing Liu. 2021. NUANCED: Natural Utterance Annotation for Nuanced Conversation with Estimated Distributions. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021, pages 4016–4024, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- NUANCED: Natural Utterance Annotation for Nuanced Conversation with Estimated Distributions (Chen et al., Findings 2021)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/proper-vol2-ingestion/2021.findings-emnlp.337.pdf
- Code
- facebookresearch/nuanced