Publications
CONFERENCE (INTERNATIONAL) Detecting Ambiguous Utterances in an Intelligent Assistant
Satoshi Akasaki, Manabu Sassano
The 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2024)
November 10, 2024
In intelligent assistants that perform both chatting and tasks through dialogue, like Siri and Alexa, users often make ambiguous utterances such as "I'm hungry" or "I have a headache," which can be interpreted as either chat or task intents. Naively determining these intents can lead to mismatched responses, spoiling the user experience. Therefore, it is desirable to determine the ambiguity of user utterances. We created a dataset from an actual intelligent assistant via crowdsourcing and analyzed tendencies of ambiguous utterances. Using this labeled data of chat, task, and ambiguous intents, we developed a supervised intent classification model. To detect ambiguous utterances robustly, we propose feeding sentence embeddings developed from microblogs and search logs with a self-attention mechanism. Experiments showed that our model outperformed two baselines, including a strong LLM-based one. We will release the dataset upon acceptance to support future research.
Paper :
Detecting Ambiguous Utterances in an Intelligent Assistant
(external link)