CHARM: Inferring Personal Attributes from Conversations

Anna Tigunova, Andrew Yates, Paramita Mirza, Gerhard Weikum


Abstract
Personal knowledge about users’ professions, hobbies, favorite food, and travel preferences, among others, is a valuable asset for individualized AI, such as recommenders or chatbots. Conversations in social media, such as Reddit, are a rich source of data for inferring personal facts. Prior work developed supervised methods to extract this knowledge, but these approaches can not generalize beyond attribute values with ample labeled training samples. This paper overcomes this limitation by devising CHARM: a zero-shot learning method that creatively leverages keyword extraction and document retrieval in order to predict attribute values that were never seen during training. Experiments with large datasets from Reddit show the viability of CHARM for open-ended attributes, such as professions and hobbies.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.434
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:
5391–5404
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.434
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.434
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Anna Tigunova, Andrew Yates, Paramita Mirza, and Gerhard Weikum. 2020. CHARM: Inferring Personal Attributes from Conversations. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 5391–5404, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
CHARM: Inferring Personal Attributes from Conversations (Tigunova et al., EMNLP 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.434.pdf
Optional supplementary material:
 2020.emnlp-main.434.OptionalSupplementaryMaterial.zip
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38939312