Dialogue Acts and Information State Julia Hirschberg CS 4706 01 14 19 1 Information State and Dialogue Acts If we want a dialogue system to be more than just form filling it Needs to Decide when user has asked a question made a proposal rejected a suggestion Ground user s utterance ask clarification questions suggestion plans Good conversational agents need sophisticated models of interpretation and generation beyond slot filling 01 14 19 2 Information State Architecture Information state representation Dialogue act interpreter Dialogue act generator Set of update rules Update dialogue state as acts are interpreted Generate dialogue acts Control structure to select which update rules to apply 01 14 19 3 Information state 01 14 19 4 Dialogue acts AKA conversational moves Actions with internal structure related specifically to their dialogue function Incorporates ideas of grounding with other dialogue and conversational functions not mentioned in classic Speech Act Theory 01 14 19 5 Speech Act Theory Reminder John Searle Speech Acts 69 Locutionary acts semantic meaning surface form Illocutionary acts request promise statement threat question Perlocutionary acts Effect intended to be produced on Hearer regret fear hope 01 14 19 6 What Kind of Speech Acts do we need for a Real Task Verbmobil Two party scheduling dialogues Speakers were asked to plan a meeting at some future date Data used to design conversational agents which would help with this task Issues Cross language Machine translation Scheduling assistant 01 14 19 7 Verbmobil Dialogue Acts THANK GREET INTRODUCE BYE REQUEST COMMENT SUGGEST REJECT ACCEPT REQUEST SUGGEST INIT GIVE REASON FEEDBACK DELIBERATE CONFIRM CLARIFY 01 14 19 thanks Hello Dan It s me again Allright bye How does that look June 13th through 17th No Friday I m booked all day Saturday sounds fine What is a good day of the week for you I wanted to make an appointment with you Because I have meetings all afternoon Okay Let me check my calendar here Okay that would be wonderful Okay do you mean Tuesday the 23rd 8 Automatic Interpretation of Dialogue Acts How do we automatically identify dialogue acts Given an utterance Decide whether it is a QUESTION STATEMENT SUGGEST or ACKNOWLEDGMENT Recognizing illocutionary force will be crucial to building a dialogue agent Perhaps we can just look at the form of the utterance to decide 01 14 19 9 Can we just use the surface syntactic form YES NO Qs have auxiliary before subject syntax Will breakfast be served on USAir 1557 STATEMENTs have declarative syntax I don t care about lunch COMMANDs have imperative syntax Show me flights from Milwaukee to Orlando on Thursday night 01 14 19 10 Surface Form Speech Act Type Locutionary Force Illocutionary Force Can I have the rest of your sandwich Question Request I want the rest of your sandwich Declarative Request Give me your sandwich Imperative Request 01 14 19 11 Dialogue act disambiguation is hard Who s on First Abbott Well Costello I m going to New York with you Bucky Harris the Yankee s manager gave me a job as coach for as long as you re on the team Costello Look Abbott if you re the coach you must know all the players Abbott I certainly do Costello Well you know I ve never met the guys So you ll have to tell me their names and then I ll know who s playing on the team Abbott Oh I ll tell you their names but you know it seems to me they give these ball players now a days very peculiar names Costello You mean funny names Abbott Strange names pet names like Dizzy Dean Costello His brother Daffy Abbott Daffy Dean Costello And their French cousin Abbott French Costello Goofe Abbott Goofe Dean Well let s see we have on the bags Who s on first What s on second I Don t Know is on third Costello That s what I want to find out 01 14 19 Abbott I say Who s on first What s on second I Don t Know s on third 12 Dialogue act ambiguity Who s on first INFO REQUEST or STATEMENT 01 14 19 13 Dialogue Act ambiguity Can you give me a list of the flights from Atlanta to Boston Looks like an INFO REQUEST If so answer is YES But really it s a DIRECTIVE or REQUEST a polite form of Please give me a list of the flights What looks like a QUESTION can be a REQUEST 01 14 19 14 Dialogue Act Ambiguity What looks like a STATEMENT can be a QUESTION Us OPENOPTION I was wanting to make some arrangements for a trip that I m going to be taking uh to LA uh beginning of the week after next Ag HOLD OK uh let me pull up your profile and I ll be right with you here pause Ag CHECK And you said you wanted to travel next week Us 01 14 19 ACCEPT Uh yes 15 Indirect Speech Acts Utterances which use a surface statement to ask a question And you want to Utterances which use a surface question to issue a request Can you get me 01 14 19 16 DA Interpretation as Statistical Classification Lots of clues in each sentence that can tell us which DA it is Words and Collocations Please or would you good cue for REQUEST Are you good cue for INFO REQUEST Prosody Rising pitch is a good cue for INFO REQUEST Loudness stress can help distinguish yeah AGREEMENT from yeah BACKCHANNEL Conversational Structure Yeah following a proposal is probably AGREEMENT yeah following an INFORM probably a BACKCHANNEL 01 14 19 17 Disambiguating Ambiguous DAs Intonationally Nickerson Chu Carroll 99 Can info requests be disambiguated reliably from action requests Modal Can would would willing questions Can you move the piano Would you move the piano Would you be willing to move the piano Experiments Production studies Subjects read ambiguous questions in disambiguating contexts Control for given new and contrastiveness Polite neutral impolite Problems Cells imbalanced No pretesting No distractors Same speaker reads both contexts Results Indirect requests e g for action If L more likely 73 to be indirect If H 46 were indirect differences in height of boundary tone Politeness can differs in impolite higher rise vs neutral Speaker variability Statistical Classifier Model of DA Interpretation Goal decide for each sentence what DA it is Classification task 1 of N classification decision for each sentence With N classes number of dialog acts Three probabilistic models corresponding to the 3 kinds of cues from the input sentence Conversational Structure Probability of one dialogue act following another P Answer Question Words and Syntax Probability of a sequence of words given a dialogue act P do you Question Prosody probability of prosodic features given a dialogue act