Applying Coreference Resolution for Usage in Dialog Systems

Abstract: Using references in language is a major part of communication, and understanding them is not a challenge for humans. Recent years have seen increased usage of dialog systems that interact with humans in natural language to assist them in various tasks, but even the most sophisticated systems still struggle with understanding references. In this thesis, we adapt a coreference resolution system for usage in dialog systems and try to understand what is needed for an efficient understanding of references in dialog systems. We annotate a portion of logs from a customer service system and perform an analysis of the most common coreferring expressions appearing in this type of data. This analysis shows that most coreferring expressions are nominal and pronominal, and they usually appear within two sentences of each other. We implement Stanford's Multi-Pass Sieve with some adaptations and dialog-specific changes and integrate it into a dialog system framework. The preprocessing pipeline makes use of already existing NLP-tools, while some new ones are added, such as a chunker, a head-finding algorithm and a NER-like system. To analyze both user input and output of the system, we deploy two separate coreference resolution systems that interact with each other. An evaluation is performed on the system and its separate parts in five most common evaluation metrics. The system does not achieve state-of-the art numbers, but because of its domain-specific nature that is expected. Some parts of the system do not have any effect on the performance, while the dialog-specific changes contribute to it greatly. An error analysis is concluded and reveals some problems with the implementation, but more importantly, it shows how the system could be further improved by using other types of knowledge and dialog-specific features.