Paper ID: 2305.12091

"What do others think?": Task-Oriented Conversational Modeling with Subjective Knowledge

Chao Zhao, Spandana Gella, Seokhwan Kim, Di Jin, Devamanyu Hazarika, Alexandros Papangelis, Behnam Hedayatnia, Mahdi Namazifar, Yang Liu, Dilek Hakkani-Tur

Task-oriented Dialogue (TOD) Systems aim to build dialogue systems that assist users in accomplishing specific goals, such as booking a hotel or a restaurant. Traditional TODs rely on domain-specific APIs/DBs or external factual knowledge to generate responses, which cannot accommodate subjective user requests (e.g., "Is the WIFI reliable?" or "Does the restaurant have a good atmosphere?"). To address this issue, we propose a novel task of subjective-knowledge-based TOD (SK-TOD). We also propose the first corresponding dataset, which contains subjective knowledge-seeking dialogue contexts and manually annotated responses grounded in subjective knowledge sources. When evaluated with existing TOD approaches, we find that this task poses new challenges such as aggregating diverse opinions from multiple knowledge snippets. We hope this task and dataset can promote further research on TOD and subjective content understanding. The code and the dataset are available at https://github.com/alexa/dstc11-track5.

Submitted: May 20, 2023