Analysis of Implicit Conditions in Database Search Dialogues

Shun-ya Fukunaga, Hitoshi Nishikawa, Takenobu Tokunaga, Hikaru Yokono, Tetsuro Takahashi

Abstract: This paper reports an annotation to a corpus of database search dialogues on real estate, and the analysis on implicit information in the utterances for constructing database queries. Two annotators annotated 50 dialogues with a set of database field tags, resulting in a high inter-annotator agreement (Cohen's kappa=0.79), and the analysis revealed that 10% of the utterances included non-database-field information. We further investigated these utterances to find that more than 93% of them included useful information for figuring out search conditions, which we call the implicit condition. The contribution of this paper is to present the existence and importance of the implicit conditions in the database search dialogues and both qualitative and quantitative analysis of them. Our corpus can provide a fundamental language resource for constructing a dialogue system which can utilise the implicit conditions. The paper concluded with possible approaches to achieve our long-term goal, extracting the implicit conditions in the database search dialogues and utilising them to construct queries.