3,853 research outputs found
Detecting domain-specific information needs in conversational search dialogues
As conversational search becomes more pervasive, it becomes
increasingly important to understand the user's underlying needs when they converse with such systems in diverse contexts. We report on an insitu experiment to collect conversationally described information needs in a home cooking scenario. A human experimenter acted as the perfect conversational search system. Based on the transcription of the utterances, we present a preliminary coding scheme comprising 27 categories to annotate the information needs of users. Moreover, we use these annotations to perform prediction experiments based on random forest classification to establish the feasibility of predicting the information need from the raw utterances. We find that a reasonable accuracy in predicting information need categories is possible and evidence the importance of stopwords in the classfication task
Dialogue Act Modeling for Automatic Tagging and Recognition of Conversational Speech
We describe a statistical approach for modeling dialogue acts in
conversational speech, i.e., speech-act-like units such as Statement, Question,
Backchannel, Agreement, Disagreement, and Apology. Our model detects and
predicts dialogue acts based on lexical, collocational, and prosodic cues, as
well as on the discourse coherence of the dialogue act sequence. The dialogue
model is based on treating the discourse structure of a conversation as a
hidden Markov model and the individual dialogue acts as observations emanating
from the model states. Constraints on the likely sequence of dialogue acts are
modeled via a dialogue act n-gram. The statistical dialogue grammar is combined
with word n-grams, decision trees, and neural networks modeling the
idiosyncratic lexical and prosodic manifestations of each dialogue act. We
develop a probabilistic integration of speech recognition with dialogue
modeling, to improve both speech recognition and dialogue act classification
accuracy. Models are trained and evaluated using a large hand-labeled database
of 1,155 conversations from the Switchboard corpus of spontaneous
human-to-human telephone speech. We achieved good dialogue act labeling
accuracy (65% based on errorful, automatically recognized words and prosody,
and 71% based on word transcripts, compared to a chance baseline accuracy of
35% and human accuracy of 84%) and a small reduction in word recognition error.Comment: 35 pages, 5 figures. Changes in copy editing (note title spelling
changed
Interview and Delivery: Dialogue Strategies for Conversational Recommender Systems
Proceedings of the 16th Nordic Conference
of Computational Linguistics NODALIDA-2007.
Editors: Joakim Nivre, Heiki-Jaan Kaalep, Kadri Muischnek and Mare Koit.
University of Tartu, Tartu, 2007.
ISBN 978-9985-4-0513-0 (online)
ISBN 978-9985-4-0514-7 (CD-ROM)
pp. 199-204
Offline and Online Satisfaction Prediction in Open-Domain Conversational Systems
Predicting user satisfaction in conversational systems has become critical,
as spoken conversational assistants operate in increasingly complex domains.
Online satisfaction prediction (i.e., predicting satisfaction of the user with
the system after each turn) could be used as a new proxy for implicit user
feedback, and offers promising opportunities to create more responsive and
effective conversational agents, which adapt to the user's engagement with the
agent. To accomplish this goal, we propose a conversational satisfaction
prediction model specifically designed for open-domain spoken conversational
agents, called ConvSAT. To operate robustly across domains, ConvSAT aggregates
multiple representations of the conversation, namely the conversation history,
utterance and response content, and system- and user-oriented behavioral
signals. We first calibrate ConvSAT performance against state of the art
methods on a standard dataset (Dialogue Breakdown Detection Challenge) in an
online regime, and then evaluate ConvSAT on a large dataset of conversations
with real users, collected as part of the Alexa Prize competition. Our
experimental results show that ConvSAT significantly improves satisfaction
prediction for both offline and online setting on both datasets, compared to
the previously reported state-of-the-art approaches. The insights from our
study can enable more intelligent conversational systems, which could adapt in
real-time to the inferred user satisfaction and engagement.Comment: Published in CIKM '19, 10 page
Report on the future conversations workshop at CHIIR 2021
The Future Conversations workshop at CHIIR’21 looked to the future of search, recommen- dation, and information interaction to ask: where are the opportunities for conversational interactions? What do we need to do to get there? Furthermore, who stands to benefit?The workshop was hands-on and interactive. Rather than a series of technical talks, we solicited position statements on opportunities, problems, and solutions in conversational search in all modalities (written, spoken, or multimodal). This paper –co-authored by the organisers and participants of the workshop– summarises the submitted statements and the discussions we had during the two sessions of the workshop. Statements discussed during the workshop are available at https://bit.ly/FutureConversations2021Statements
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