X-RiSAWOZ: High-Quality End-to-End Multilingual Dialogue Datasets and Few-shot Agents

Task-oriented dialogue research has mainly focused on a few popular languages like English and Chinese, due to the high dataset creation cost for a new language. To reduce the cost, we apply manual editing to automatically translated data. We create a new multilingual benchmark, X-RiSAWOZ, by translating the Chinese RiSAWOZ to 4 languages: English, French, Hindi, Korean; and a code-mixed English-Hindi language. X-RiSAWOZ has more than 18,000 human-verified dialogue utterances for each language, and unlike most multilingual prior work, is an end-to-end dataset for building fully-functioning agents. The many difficulties we encountered in creating X-RiSAWOZ led us to develop a toolset to accelerate the post-editing of a new language dataset after translation. This toolset improves machine translation with a hybrid entity alignment technique that combines neural with dictionary-based methods, along with many automated and semi-automated validation checks. We establish strong baselines for X-RiSAWOZ by training dialogue agents in the zero- and few-shot settings where limited gold data is available in the target language. Our results suggest that our translation and post-editing methodology and toolset can be used to create new high-quality multilingual dialogue agents cost-effectively. Our dataset, code, and toolkit are released open-source.

GeSERA: General-domain Summary Evaluation by Relevance Analysis

We present GeSERA, an open-source improved version of SERA for evaluating automatic extractive and abstractive summaries from the general domain. SERA is based on a search engine that compares candidate and reference summaries (called queries) against an information retrieval document base (called index). SERA was originally designed for the biomedical domain only, where it showed a better correlation with manual methods than the widely used lexical-based ROUGE method. In this paper, we take out SERA from the biomedical domain to the general one by adapting its content-based method to successfully evaluate summaries from the general domain. First, we improve the query reformulation strategy with POS Tags analysis of general-domain corpora. Second, we replace the biomedical index used in SERA with two article collections from AQUAINT-2 and Wikipedia. We conduct experiments with TAC2008, TAC2009, and CNNDM datasets. Results show that, in most cases, GeSERA achieves higher correlations with manual evaluation methods than SERA, while it reduces its gap with ROUGE for general-domain summary evaluation. GeSERA even surpasses ROUGE in two cases of TAC2009. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments and provide a comprehensive study of the impact of human annotators and the index size on summary evaluation with SERA and GeSERA.

Semantic Similarity To Improve Question Understanding in a Virtual Patient

In medicine, a communicating virtual patient or doctor allows students to train in medical diagnosis and develop skills to conduct a medical consultation. In this paper, we describe a conversational virtual standardized patient system to allow medical students to simulate a diagnosis strategy of an abdominal surgical emergency. We exploited the semantic properties captured by distributed word representations to search for similar questions in the virtual patient dialogue system. We created two dialogue systems that were evaluated on datasets collected during tests with students. The first system based on hand-crafted rules obtains $92.29\%$ as $F1$-score on the studied clinical case while the second system that combines rules and semantic similarity achieves $94.88\%$. It represents an error reduction of $9.70\%$ as compared to the rules-only-based system.