No Arabic abstract
Next generation virtual assistants are envisioned to handle multimodal inputs (e.g., vision, memories of previous interactions, in addition to the users utterances), and perform multimodal actions (e.g., displaying a route in addition to generating the systems utterance). We introduce Situated Interactive MultiModal Conversations (SIMMC) as a new direction aimed at training agents that take multimodal actions grounded in a co-evolving multimodal input context in addition to the dialog history. We provide two SIMMC datasets totalling ~13K human-human dialogs (~169K utterances) using a multimodal Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ) setup, on two shopping domains: (a) furniture (grounded in a shared virtual environment) and, (b) fashion (grounded in an evolving set of images). We also provide logs of the items appearing in each scene, and contextual NLU and coreference annotations, using a novel and unified framework of SIMMC conversational acts for both user and assistant utterances. Finally, we present several tasks within SIMMC as objective evaluation protocols, such as Structural API Prediction and Response Generation. We benchmark a collection of existing models on these SIMMC tasks as strong baselines, and demonstrate rich multimodal conversational interactions. Our data, annotations, code, and models are publicly available.
As digital virtual assistants become ubiquitous, it becomes increasingly important to understand the situated behaviour of users as they interact with these assistants. To this end, we introduce SIMMC, an extension to ParlAI for multi-modal conversational data collection and system evaluation. SIMMC simulates an immersive setup, where crowd workers are able to interact with environments constructed in AI Habitat or Unity while engaging in a conversation. The assistant in SIMMC can be a crowd worker or Artificial Intelligent (AI) agent. This enables both (i) a multi-player / Wizard of Oz setting for data collection, or (ii) a single player mode for model / system evaluation. We plan to open-source a situated conversational data-set collected on this platform for the Conversational AI research community.
We present a new corpus for the Situated and Interactive Multimodal Conversations, SIMMC 2.0, aimed at building a successful multimodal assistant agent. Specifically, the dataset features 11K task-oriented dialogs (117K utterances) between a user and a virtual assistant on the shopping domain (fashion and furniture), grounded in situated and photo-realistic VR scenes. The dialogs are collected using a two-phase pipeline, which first generates simulated dialog flows via a novel multimodal dialog simulator we propose, followed by manual paraphrasing of the generated utterances. In this paper, we provide an in-depth analysis of the collected dataset, and describe in detail the four main benchmark tasks we propose for SIMMC 2.0. The preliminary analysis with a baseline model highlights the new challenges that the SIMMC 2.0 dataset brings, suggesting new directions for future research. Our dataset and code will be made publicly available.
Our overall program objective is to provide more natural ways for soldiers to interact and communicate with robots, much like how soldiers communicate with other soldiers today. We describe how the Wizard-of-Oz (WOz) method can be applied to multimodal human-robot dialogue in a collaborative exploration task. While the WOz method can help design robot behaviors, traditional approaches place the burden of decisions on a single wizard. In this work, we consider two wizards to stand in for robot navigation and dialogue management software components. The scenario used to elicit data is one in which a human-robot team is tasked with exploring an unknown environment: a human gives verbal instructions from a remote location and the robot follows them, clarifying possible misunderstandings as needed via dialogue. We found the division of labor between wizards to be workable, which holds promise for future software development.
Intersectional bias is a bias caused by an overlap of multiple social factors like gender, sexuality, race, disability, religion, etc. A recent study has shown that word embedding models can be laden with biases against intersectional groups like African American females, etc. The first step towards tackling such intersectional biases is to identify them. However, discovering biases against different intersectional groups remains a challenging task. In this work, we present WordBias, an interactive visual tool designed to explore biases against intersectional groups encoded in static word embeddings. Given a pretrained static word embedding, WordBias computes the association of each word along different groups based on race, age, etc. and then visualizes them using a novel interactive interface. Using a case study, we demonstrate how WordBias can help uncover biases against intersectional groups like Black Muslim Males, Poor Females, etc. encoded in word embedding. In addition, we also evaluate our tool using qualitative feedback from expert interviews. The source code for this tool can be publicly accessed for reproducibility at github.com/bhavyaghai/WordBias.
Conversations contain a wide spectrum of multimodal information that gives us hints about the emotions and moods of the speaker. In this paper, we developed a system that supports humans to analyze conversations. Our main contribution is the identification of appropriate multimodal features and the integration of such features into verbatim conversation transcripts. We demonstrate the ability of our system to take in a wide range of multimodal information and automatically generated a prediction score for the depression state of the individual. Our experiments showed that this approach yielded better performance than the baseline model. Furthermore, the multimodal narrative approach makes it easy to integrate learnings from other disciplines, such as conversational analysis and psychology. Lastly, this interdisciplinary and automated approach is a step towards emulating how practitioners record the course of treatment as well as emulating how conversational analysts have been analyzing conversations by hand.