ArgSciChat: A Dataset for Argumentative Dialogues on Scientific Papers

TL;DR

This paper introduces ArgSciChat, a new dataset of 41 scientific dialogues involving scientists discussing papers, and a framework for collecting expert scientific dialogue data to advance conversational agents in scientific domains.

Contribution

It presents a novel framework for collecting scientific dialogues from experts and releases a new dataset, addressing the lack of scientific dialogue data for training conversational agents.

Findings

Existing conversational agents perform poorly on ArgSciChat.

The dataset contains 498 messages from 41 dialogues on 20 scientific papers.

The framework facilitates expert participation in dialogue data collection.

Abstract

The applications of conversational agents for scientific disciplines (as expert domains) are understudied due to the lack of dialogue data to train such agents. While most data collection frameworks, such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, foster data collection for generic domains by connecting crowd workers and task designers, these frameworks are not much optimized for data collection in expert domains. Scientists are rarely present in these frameworks due to their limited time budget. Therefore, we introduce a novel framework to collect dialogues between scientists as domain experts on scientific papers. Our framework lets scientists present their scientific papers as groundings for dialogues and participate in dialogue they like its paper title. We use our framework to collect a novel argumentative dialogue dataset, ArgSciChat. It consists of 498 messages collected from 41 dialogues on 20 scientific papers. Alongside extensive analysis on ArgSciChat, we evaluate a recent conversational agent on our dataset. Experimental results show that this agent poorly performs on ArgSciChat, motivating further research on argumentative scientific agents. We release our framework and the dataset.