This paper investigates the application of machine learning (ML) techniques to enable intelligent systems to learn multi-party turn-taking models from dialogue logs. The specific ML task consists of determining who speaks next, after each utterance of a dialogue, given who has spoken and what was said in the previous utterances. With this goal, this paper presents comparisons of the accuracy of different ML techniques such as Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE), Support Vector Machines (SVM), and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) architectures, with and without utterance data. We present three corpora: the first with dialogues from an American TV situated comedy (chit-chat), the second with logs from a financial advice multi-bot system and the third with a corpus created from the Multi-Domain Wizard-of-Oz dataset (both are topic-oriented). The results show: (i) the size of the corpus has a very positive impact on the accuracy for the content-based deep learning approaches and those models perform best in the larger datasets; and (ii) if the dialogue dataset is small and topic-oriented (but with few topics), it is sufficient to use an agent-only MLE or SVM models, although slightly higher accuracies can be achieved with the use of the content of the utterances with a CNN model.
In this paper, we describe our experience with collecting and creating an annotated corpus of multi-party online conversations in a chat-room environment. This effort is part of a larger project to develop computational models of social phenomena such as agenda control, influence, and leadership in on-line interactions. Such models will help capturing the dialogue dynamics that are essential for developing, among others, realistic human-machine dialogue systems, including autonomous virtual chat agents. In this paper we describe data collection method used and the characteristics of the initial dataset of English chat. We have devised a multi-tiered collection process in which the subjects start from simple, free-flowing conversations and progress towards more complex and structured interactions. In this paper, we report on the first two stages of this process, which were recently completed. The third, large-scale collection effort is currently being conducted. All English dialogue has been annotated at four levels: communication links, dialogue acts, local topics and meso-topics. During the past decade, several areas of speech and language understanding have witnessed substantial breakthroughs from the use of data-driven models. In the area of dialogue systems, the trend is less obvious, and most practical systems are still built through significant engineering and expert knowledge. Nevertheless, several recent results suggest that data-driven approaches are feasible and quite promising. To facilitate research in this area, we have carried out a wide survey of publicly available datasets suitable for data-driven learning of dialogue systems. We discuss important characteristics of these datasets, how they can be used to learn diverse dialogue strategies, and their other potential uses. We also examine methods for transfer learning between datasets and the use of external knowledge. Finally, we discuss appropriate choice of evaluation metrics for the learning objective. When multiple conversations occur simultaneously, a listener must decide which conversation each utterance is part of in order to interpret and respond to it appropriately. We refer to this task as disentanglement. We present a corpus of Internet Relay Chat (IRC) dialogue in which the various conversations have been manually disentangled, and evaluate annotator reliability. This is, to our knowledge, the first such corpus for internet chat. We propose a graph-theoretic model for disentanglement, using discourse-based features which have not been previously applied to this task. The model’s predicted disentanglements are highly correlated with manual annotations.