“Mama Always Had a Way of Explaining Things So I Could Understand”

A Dialogue Corpus for Learning to Construct Explanations

authored by

Henning Wachsmuth, Milad Alshomary

Abstract

As AI is more and more pervasive in everyday life, humans have an increasing demand to understand its behavior and decisions. Most research on explainable AI builds on the premise that there is one ideal explanation to be found. In fact, however, everyday explanations are co-constructed in a dialogue between the person explaining (the explainer) and the specific person being explained to (the explainee). In this paper, we introduce a first corpus of dialogical explanations to enable NLP research on how humans explain as well as on how AI can learn to imitate this process. The corpus consists of 65 transcribed English dialogues from the Wired video series 5 Levels, explaining 13 topics to five explainees of different proficiency. All 1550 dialogue turns have been manually labeled by five independent professionals for the topic discussed as well as for the dialogue act and the explanation move performed. We analyze linguistic patterns of explainers and explainees, and we explore differences across proficiency levels. BERT-based baseline results indicate that sequence information helps predicting topics, acts, and moves effectively.

External Organisation(s)

Paderborn University

Type

Conference article

Journal

Proceedings - International Conference on Computational Linguistics, COLING

Volume

29

Pages

344-354

No. of pages

11

ISSN

2951-2093

Publication date

2022

Publication status

Published

Peer reviewed

Yes

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Computational Theory and Mathematics, Computer Science Applications, Theoretical Computer Science