CREAD: Combined Resolution of Ellipses and Anaphora in Dialogues

Bo-Hsiang Tseng, Shruti Bhargava, Jiarui Lu, Joel Ruben Antony Moniz, Dhivya Piraviperumal, Lin Li, Hong Yu


Abstract
Anaphora and ellipses are two common phenomena in dialogues. Without resolving referring expressions and information omission, dialogue systems may fail to generate consistent and coherent responses. Traditionally, anaphora is resolved by coreference resolution and ellipses by query rewrite. In this work, we propose a novel joint learning framework of modeling coreference resolution and query rewriting for complex, multi-turn dialogue understanding. Given an ongoing dialogue between a user and a dialogue assistant, for the user query, our joint learning model first predicts coreference links between the query and the dialogue context, and then generates a self-contained rewritten user query. To evaluate our model, we annotate a dialogue based coreference resolution dataset, MuDoCo, with rewritten queries. Results show that the performance of query rewrite can be substantially boosted (+2.3% F1) with the aid of coreference modeling. Furthermore, our joint model outperforms the state-of-the-art coreference resolution model (+2% F1) on this dataset.
Anthology ID:
2021.naacl-main.265
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Month:
June
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Kristina Toutanova, Anna Rumshisky, Luke Zettlemoyer, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Iz Beltagy, Steven Bethard, Ryan Cotterell, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Yichao Zhou
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3390–3406
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.265
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.265
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Bo-Hsiang Tseng, Shruti Bhargava, Jiarui Lu, Joel Ruben Antony Moniz, Dhivya Piraviperumal, Lin Li, and Hong Yu. 2021. CREAD: Combined Resolution of Ellipses and Anaphora in Dialogues. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 3390–3406, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
CREAD: Combined Resolution of Ellipses and Anaphora in Dialogues (Tseng et al., NAACL 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.265.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.265.mp4
Code
 apple/ml-cread
Data
MuDoCo_QueryRewrite