Computer-based job interview training, including virtual reality (VR) simulations, have gained popularity in recent years to support and aid autistic individuals, who face significant challenges and barriers in finding and maintaining employment. Although popular, these training systems often fail to resemble the complexity and dynamism of the employment interview, as the dialogue management for the virtual conversation agent either relies on choosing from a menu of prespecified answers, or dialogue processing is based on keyword extraction from the transcribed speech of the interviewee, which depends on the interview script. We address this limitation through automated dialogue act classification via transfer learning. This allows for recognizing intent from user speech, independent of the domain of the interview. We also redress the lack of training data for a domain general job interview dialogue act classifier by providing an original dataset with responses to interview questions within a virtual job interview platform from 22 autistic participants. Participants’ responses to a customized interview script were transcribed to text and annotated according to a custom 13-class dialogue act scheme. The best classifier was a fine-tuned bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) model, with an f1-score of 87%.
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Annotating low-confidence questions improves classifier performance
This paper compares methods to select data for annotation in order to improve a classifier used in a question-answering dialogue system. With a classifier trained on 1,500 questions, adding 300 training questions on which the classifier is least confident results in consistently improved performance, whereas adding 300 arbitrarily selected training questions does not yield consistent improvement, and sometimes even degrades performance. The paper uses a new method for comparative evaluation of classifiers for dialogue, which scores each classifier based on the number of appropriate responses retrieved.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1852583
- PAR ID:
- 10313591
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 25th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue - Poster Abstracts
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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