Towards Handling Unconstrained User Preferences in Dialogue

A user input to a schema-driven dialogue information navigation system, such as venue search, is typically constrained by the underlying database which restricts the user to specify a predefined set of preferences, or slots, corresponding to the database fields. We envision a more natural information navigation dialogue interface where a user has flexibility to specify unconstrained preferences that may not match a predefined schema. We propose to use information retrieval from unstructured knowledge to identify entities relevant to a user request. We update the Cambridge restaurants database with unstructured knowledge snippets (reviews and information from the web) for each of the restaurants and annotate a set of query-snippet pairs with a relevance label. We use the annotated dataset to train and evaluate snippet relevance classifiers, as a proxy to evaluating recommendation accuracy. We show that with a pretrained transformer model as an encoder, an unsupervised/supervised classifier achieves a weighted F1 of .661/.856.

SemEval-2020 Task 9: Overview of Sentiment Analysis of Code-Mixed Tweets

In this paper, we present the results of the SemEval-2020 Task 9 on Sentiment Analysis of Code-Mixed Tweets (SentiMix 2020). We also release and describe our Hinglish (Hindi-English) and Spanglish (Spanish-English) corpora annotated with word-level language identification and sentence-level sentiment labels. These corpora are comprised of 20K and 19K examples, respectively. The sentiment labels are - Positive, Negative, and Neutral. SentiMix attracted 89 submissions in total including 61 teams that participated in the Hinglish contest and 28 submitted systems to the Spanglish competition. The best performance achieved was 75.0% F1 score for Hinglish and 80.6% F1 for Spanglish. We observe that BERT-like models and ensemble methods are the most common and successful approaches among the participants.