@inproceedings{louis-etal-2020-id,
title = "{``}{I}{'}d rather just go to bed{''}: Understanding Indirect Answers",
author = "Louis, Annie and
Roth, Dan and
Radlinski, Filip",
editor = "Webber, Bonnie and
Cohn, Trevor and
He, Yulan and
Liu, Yang",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)",
month = nov,
year = "2020",
address = "Online",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.601",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.601",
pages = "7411--7425",
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.",
}
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<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.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T “I’d rather just go to bed”: Understanding Indirect Answers
%A Louis, Annie
%A Roth, Dan
%A Radlinski, Filip
%Y Webber, Bonnie
%Y Cohn, Trevor
%Y He, Yulan
%Y Liu, Yang
%S Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
%D 2020
%8 November
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Online
%F louis-etal-2020-id
%X 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.
%R 10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.601
%U https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.601
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.601
%P 7411-7425
Markdown (Informal)
[“I’d rather just go to bed”: Understanding Indirect Answers](https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.601) (Louis et al., EMNLP 2020)
ACL