Abstract
In conversation, a speaker sometimes asks questions that relate to another speaker’s detailed personality, such as his/her favorite foods and sports. This behavior also appears in conversations with conversational agents; therefore, agents should be developed that can respond to such questions. In previous agents, this was achieved by creating question-answer pairs defined by hand. However, when a small number of persons create the pairs, we cannot know what types of questions are frequently asked. This makes it difficult to know whether the created questions cover frequently asked questions; therefore, such essential question-answer pairs for conversational agents are possibly overlooked. This study analyzes a large number of question-answer pairs for six personae created by many question-generators, with one answer-generator for each persona. The proposed approach allows many questioners to create questions for various personae, enabling us to investigate the types of questions that are frequently asked. A comparison with questions appearing in conversations between humans shows that 50.2% of the questions were contained in our question-answer pairs and the coverage rate was almost saturated with the 20 recruited question-generators.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Batacharia, B., Levy, D., Catizone, R., Krotov, A., Wilks, Y.: CONVERSE: a conversational companion. Machine Conversations, pp. 205–215 (1999)
Bickmore, T., Cassell, J.: Relational Agents: A Model and Implementation of Building User Trust. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 396–403 (2001)
Caspi, A., Roberts, B.W., Shiner, R.L.: Personality development: stability and change. Annual Review of Psychology 56, 453–484 (2005)
Higashinaka, R., Imamura, K., Meguro, T., Miyazaki, C., Kobayashi, N., Sugiyama, H., Hirano, T., Makino, T., Matsuo, Y.: Towards an open domain conversational system fully based on natural language processing. In: Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (2014)
John, O.P., Srivastava, S.: The Big Five trait taxonomy: History, measurement, and theoretical perspectives. No. 510 (1999)
Mairesse, F., Walker, M.: PERSONAGE: Personality generation for dialogue. In: Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association For Computational Linguistics, pp. 496–503 (2007)
Nagata, M., Saito, K., Matsuo, Y.: Japanese natural language retrieval system: Web Answers. In: Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association of Natural Language Processing, p. B2–2 (2006) (in Japanese)
Meguro, T., Higashinaka, R., Minami, Y., Dohsaka, K.: Controlling Listening-oriented Dialogue using Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes. In: Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pp. 761–769 (2010)
Nisimura, R., Nishihara, Y., Tsurumi, R., Lee, A., Saruwatari, H., Shikano, K.: Takemaru-kun: Speech-oriented Information System for Real World Research Platform. In: Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Language Understanding and Agents for Real World Interaction, pp. 70–78 (2003)
Ritter, A., Cherry, C., Dolan, W.: Data-Driven Response Generation in Social Media. In: Proceedings of the 2011 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pp. 583–593 (2011)
Rossen, B., Lok, B.: A crowdsourcing method to develop virtual human conversational agents. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 70(4), 301–319 (2012)
Sekine, S., Sudo, K., Nobata, C.: Extended Named Entity Hierarchy. In: LREC (2002)
Shibata, M., Nishiguchi, T., Tomiura, Y.: Dialog System for Open-Ended Conversation Using Web Documents. Informatica 33, 277–284 (2009)
Singh, P., Lin, T., Mueller, E.T., Lim, G., Perkins, T., Zhu, W.L.: Open Mind Common Sense: Knowledge Acquisition from the General Public. In: Meersman, R., Tari, Z. (eds.) CoopIS/DOA/ODBASE 2002. LNCS, vol. 2519, pp. 1223–1237. Springer, Heidelberg (2002)
Sugiyama, H., Meguro, T., Higashinaka, R., Minami, Y.: Open-domain Utterance Generation for Conversational Dialogue Systems using Web-scale Dependency Structures. In: Proceedings of the 14th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue, pp. 334–338 (2013)
Tidwell, L.C., Walther, J.B.: Computer-Mediated Communication Effects on Disclosure, Impressions, and Interpersonal Evaluations. Human Communication Research 28(3), 317–348 (2002)
Wong, W., Cavedon, L., Thangarajah, J., Padgham, L.: Strategies for Mixed-Initiative Conversation Management using Question-Answer Pairs. In: Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pp. 2821–2834 (2012)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Sugiyama, H., Meguro, T., Higashinaka, R., Minami, Y. (2014). Large-scale Collection and Analysis of Personal Question-Answer Pairs for Conversational Agents. In: Bickmore, T., Marsella, S., Sidner, C. (eds) Intelligent Virtual Agents. IVA 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8637. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09767-1_53
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09767-1_53
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-09766-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-09767-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)