On the Underspecification of Situations in Open-domain Conversational Datasets

Naoki Otani, Jun Araki, HyeongSik Kim, Eduard Hovy


Abstract
Advances of open-domain conversational systems have been achieved through the creation of numerous conversation datasets. However, many of the commonly used datasets contain little or no information about the conversational situation, such as relevant objects/people, their properties, and relationships. This absence leads to underspecification of the problem space and typically results in undesired dialogue system behavior. This position paper discusses the current state of the field associated with processing situational information. An analysis of response generation using three datasets shows that explicitly provided situational information can improve the coherence and specificity of generated responses, but further experiments reveal that generation systems can be misled by irrelevant information. Our conclusions from this evaluation provide insights into the problem and directions for future research.
Anthology ID:
2023.nlp4convai-1.2
Volume:
Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on NLP for Conversational AI (NLP4ConvAI 2023)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Yun-Nung Chen, Abhinav Rastogi
Venue:
NLP4ConvAI
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
12–28
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.nlp4convai-1.2
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.nlp4convai-1.2
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Naoki Otani, Jun Araki, HyeongSik Kim, and Eduard Hovy. 2023. On the Underspecification of Situations in Open-domain Conversational Datasets. In Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on NLP for Conversational AI (NLP4ConvAI 2023), pages 12–28, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
On the Underspecification of Situations in Open-domain Conversational Datasets (Otani et al., NLP4ConvAI 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.nlp4convai-1.2.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.nlp4convai-1.2.mp4