Distinguishing Different Classes of Utterances - the UC-PT Corpus

Authors Mariana Gaspar Fernandes, Cátia Dias, Luísa Coheur



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Author Details

Mariana Gaspar Fernandes
  • INESC-ID, Lisboa, Portugal
  • Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal
Cátia Dias
  • INESC-ID, Lisboa, Portugal
  • Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal
Luísa Coheur
  • INESC-ID, Lisboa, Portugal
  • Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal

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Mariana Gaspar Fernandes, Cátia Dias, and Luísa Coheur. Distinguishing Different Classes of Utterances - the UC-PT Corpus. In 8th Symposium on Languages, Applications and Technologies (SLATE 2019). Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs), Volume 74, pp. 14:1-14:8, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2019)
https://doi.org/10.4230/OASIcs.SLATE.2019.14

Abstract

Conversational bots are being used in many scenarios and we can find them playing museum guides or providing customer support, for instance. These bots base their answers in specific information related with their domain of expertise, but there is general information, presented in each user request that, when properly identified, could also be useful for the agent to decide what to answer. As an example, if the user is asking a question or uttering a statement, the bot’s action in its search for a response will probably differ. In this paper we present three corpora for the Portuguese language - the UC-PT corpus - that can be used to help conversational bots to distinguish: a) questions from non questions, b) yes-no-questions from other types of questions; and c) personal from non-personal questions. With this information, the agent can decide, for instance, not to answer, redirect the question to a persona chatbot or decide to answer it with a simple "yes", "no" or "maybe". In addition, we benchmark the classification process in these corpora. This corpora will be made publicly available.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Information systems → Question answering
  • Computing methodologies → Language resources
  • Social and professional topics → Computer and information systems training
  • Applied computing → Annotation
  • Computing methodologies → Supervised learning
  • Information systems → Information extraction
Keywords
  • Corpora
  • Questions
  • Conversational Agents
  • Portuguese Language

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