Grounding Conversations with Improvised Dialogues

Hyundong Cho, Jonathan May

Abstract Paper Share

Dialogue and Interactive Systems Long Paper

Session 4B: Jul 6 (18:00-19:00 GMT)
Session 5B: Jul 6 (21:00-22:00 GMT)
Abstract: Effective dialogue involves grounding, the process of establishing mutual knowledge that is essential for communication between people. Modern dialogue systems are not explicitly trained to build common ground, and therefore overlook this important aspect of communication. Improvisational theater (improv) intrinsically contains a high proportion of dialogue focused on building common ground, and makes use of the yes-and principle, a strong grounding speech act, to establish coherence and an actionable objective reality. We collect a corpus of more than 26,000 yes-and turns, transcribing them from improv dialogues and extracting them from larger, but more sparsely populated movie script dialogue corpora, via a bootstrapped classifier. We fine-tune chit-chat dialogue systems with our corpus to encourage more grounded, relevant conversation and confirm these findings with human evaluations.
You can open the pre-recorded video in a separate window.
NOTE: The SlidesLive video may display a random order of the authors. The correct author list is shown at the top of this webpage.

Similar Papers

Dialogue Coherence Assessment Without Explicit Dialogue Act Labels
Mohsen Mesgar, Sebastian Bücker, Iryna Gurevych,
A representative figure from paper main.133
You Impress Me: Dialogue Generation via Mutual Persona Perception
Qian Liu, Yihong Chen, Bei Chen, Jian-Guang Lou, Zixuan Chen, Bin Zhou, Dongmei Zhang,
A representative figure from paper main.131
Learning an Unreferenced Metric for Online Dialogue Evaluation
Koustuv Sinha, Prasanna Parthasarathi, Jasmine Wang, Ryan Lowe, William L. Hamilton, Joelle Pineau,
A representative figure from paper main.220
DIALOGPT : Large-Scale Generative Pre-training for Conversational Response Generation
Yizhe Zhang, Siqi Sun, Michel Galley, Yen-Chun Chen, Chris Brockett, Xiang Gao, Jianfeng Gao, Jingjing Liu, Bill Dolan,
A representative figure from paper demo.37