I’d rather just go to bed”: Understanding Indirect Answers

Annie Louis, Dan Roth, Filip Radlinski


Abstract
We revisit a pragmatic inference problem in dialog: Understanding indirect responses to questions. Humans can interpret ‘I’m starving.’ in response to ‘Hungry?’, even without direct cue words such as ‘yes’ and ‘no’. In dialog systems, allowing natural responses rather than closed vocabularies would be similarly beneficial. However, today’s systems are only as sensitive to these pragmatic moves as their language model allows. We create and release the first large-scale English language corpus ‘Circa’ with 34,268 (polar question, indirect answer) pairs to enable progress on this task. The data was collected via elaborate crowdsourcing, and contains utterances with yes/no meaning, as well as uncertain, middle-ground, and conditional responses. We also present BERT-based neural models to predict such categories for a question-answer pair. We find that while transfer learning from entailment works reasonably, performance is not yet sufficient for robust dialog. Our models reach 82-88% accuracy for a 4-class distinction, and 74-85% for 6 classes.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.601
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Bonnie Webber, Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7411–7425
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.601
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.601
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Annie Louis, Dan Roth, and Filip Radlinski. 2020. “I’d rather just go to bed”: Understanding Indirect Answers. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 7411–7425, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
“I’d rather just go to bed”: Understanding Indirect Answers (Louis et al., EMNLP 2020)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.601.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38939020