Did they answer? Subjective acts and intents in conversational discourse
Elisa Ferracane, Greg Durrett, Junyi Jessy Li, Katrin Erk
Abstract
Discourse signals are often implicit, leaving it up to the interpreter to draw the required inferences. At the same time, discourse is embedded in a social context, meaning that interpreters apply their own assumptions and beliefs when resolving these inferences, leading to multiple, valid interpretations. However, current discourse data and frameworks ignore the social aspect, expecting only a single ground truth. We present the first discourse dataset with multiple and subjective interpretations of English conversation in the form of perceived conversation acts and intents. We carefully analyze our dataset and create computational models to (1) confirm our hypothesis that taking into account the bias of the interpreters leads to better predictions of the interpretations, (2) and show disagreements are nuanced and require a deeper understanding of the different contextual factors. We share our dataset and code at http://github.com/elisaF/subjective_discourse.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{ferracane-etal-2021-answer,
title = "Did they answer? Subjective acts and intents in conversational discourse",
author = "Ferracane, Elisa and
Durrett, Greg and
Li, Junyi Jessy and
Erk, Katrin",
editor = "Toutanova, Kristina and
Rumshisky, Anna and
Zettlemoyer, Luke and
Hakkani-Tur, Dilek and
Beltagy, Iz and
Bethard, Steven and
Cotterell, Ryan and
Chakraborty, Tanmoy and
Zhou, Yichao",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies",
month = jun,
year = "2021",
address = "Online",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.129/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.129",
pages = "1626--1644"
}