This repository accompanies our EMNLP 2020 paper which you can cite like this:

@inproceedings{rodriguez2020curiosity,
    title = {Information Seeking in the Spirit of Learning: a Dataset for Conversational Curiosity},
    author = {Pedro Rodriguez and Paul Crook and Seungwhan Moon and Zhiguang Wang},
    year = 2020,
    booktitle = {Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing}
}

To explore the dataset visit: datasets.pedro.ai/dataset/curiosity

For a summary of our work visit: pedro.ai/curiosity

The project has three components:

1. The Curiosity dataset in dialog_data/curiosity_dialogs.json, with folded versions in dialog_data/curiosity_dialogs.*.json
2. Modeling code used in experiments
3. Analysis, plotting, and latex code that generates the publication's PDF file.

• curiosity_dialogs.{train, val, test, test_zero}.json: Dialogs corresponding to each data fold
• wiki_sql.sqlite.db: A sqlite database storing our processed version of the Wikipedia subset that we use
• fact_db_links.json: A json file containing an entity linked version of our Wikipedia data. It stores the location of the entity link, which the database does not contain

There are two ways to download our data.

First, you could clone our repository and use git lfs.

1. Install git lfs
2. Clone the repository: https://github.com/facebookresearch/curiosity.git
3. Run git lfs pull

Second, you can download from these URLs with tools like wget:

• https://obj.umiacs.umd.edu/curiosity/curiosity_dialogs.json
• https://obj.umiacs.umd.edu/curiosity/curiosity_dialogs.train.json
• https://obj.umiacs.umd.edu/curiosity/curiosity_dialogs.val.json
• https://obj.umiacs.umd.edu/curiosity/curiosity_dialogs.test.json
• https://obj.umiacs.umd.edu/curiosity/curiosity_dialogs.test_zero.json
• https://obj.umiacs.umd.edu/curiosity/fact_db_links.json
• https://obj.umiacs.umd.edu/curiosity/wiki2vec_entity_100d.txt
• https://obj.umiacs.umd.edu/curiosity/wiki_sql.sqlite.db

We provide the inputs to our modeling experiments; to reproduce these inputs follow these instructions.

The file wiki2vec_entity_100d.txt is the output of running the following steps:

1. Download the embeddings with wget http://wikipedia2vec.s3.amazonaws.com/models/en/2018-04-20/enwiki_20180420_100d.txt.bz2
2. Decompress: bzip2 -d enwiki_20180420_100d.txt.bz2
3. Filter out non-entities with:
4. ./cli filter-emb enwiki_20180420_100d.txt wiki2vec_entity_100d.txt

Our model code is written using pytorch and allennlp. Before reproducing our experiments, you'll need to install some software.

Install a recent version of anaconda python https://www.anaconda.com/distribution/. The canonical way to reproduce our experiments is with the poetry configuration. We also provide anaconda environment definitions, but the exact versions of all dependencies are not pinned so results may differ.

1. Install poetry
2. Run conda create -n curiosity python=3.7
3. Run conda activate curiosity (fish shell)
4. Run poetry install
5. Before running any model commands, activate the environment with poetry shell

For CPU:

1. Create an anaconda environment conda env create -f environment.yaml (creates an environment named curiosity)
2. Activate the environment, in fish shell this is conda activate curiosity

For GPU:

1. Create an anaconda environment conda env create -f environment_gpu.yaml (creates an environment named curiosity)
2. Activate the environment, in fish shell this is conda activate curiosity

If you prefer using Docker for dependencies, we include a Dockerfile that builds all the required dependencies. Note, that to enable GPU support you may need to use nvidia-docker and modify this file to install cuda dependencies

Models are run using a combination of the allennlp train, allennlp evaluate, and ./cli command (in this repository).

In our paper, we vary models according to two axes:

• Our charm model corresponds to glove_bilstm
• glove_distributed is the context-free version of charm
• The bert baseline corresponds to e2e_bert
• Names with like glove_bilstm-feature mean train glove_bilstm ablating (- minus) feature.

allennlp defines model configuration with jsonnet or json files. In our work, we used the configuration files in configs/generated/:

• glove_bilstm.json
• glove_distributed.json
• e2e_bert.json

These configurations were generated from the parent configuration configs/model.jsonnet To re-generate these, you can run this command:

$ ./cli gen-configs experiments/

This generates configurations in configs/generated/ and a run file run_allennlp.sh that lists the correct command to run each model variant. Generally, the commands look like this:

$ allennlp train --include-package curiosity -s models/glove_bilstm -f configs/generated/glove_bilstm.json
$ allennlp evaluate --include-package curiosity --output-file experiments/glove_bilstm_val_metrics.json models/glove_bilstm dialog_data/curiosity_dialogs.val.json
$ allennlp evaluate --include-package curiosity --output-file experiments/glove_bilstm_test_metrics.json models/glove_bilstm dialog_data/curiosity_dialogs.test.json
$ allennlp evaluate --include-package curiosity --output-file experiments/glove_bilstm_zero_metrics.json models/glove_bilstm dialog_data/curiosity_dialogs.test_zero.json

By default, the configurations don't specify the cuda device so this must be passed in as an override like so:

• For allennlp train: -o '{"trainer": {"cuda_device": 0}}'
• For allennlp evaluate: --cuda-device 0

The configuration generator also properly names files so that if you copy files with ssh as shown below, the results will automagically update the next time you run make 2020_acl_curiosity.paper.pdf in the repo:

By default, the scripts in run_allennlp.sh put models in models/ and experimental results (metrics etc) in experiments. Our code is designed so that copying the contents of experiments into a corresponding directory in the paper code will "import" the results into the paper.

# Local copy
cp 'experiments/*' ~/code/curiosity-paper/2020_emnlp_curiosity/data/experiments/
# remote copy
scp 'experiments/*' hostname:~/code/curiosity-paper/2020_emnlp_curiosity/data/experiments/

Run pytest to run unit tests for the loss, metrics, and reader.

The code for the paper can be found here: github.com/entilzha/publications

1. Is the data collection interface open source? No, unfortunately that is tied to internal systems so it is difficult to open source. The interfaces were written in a combination of ReactJS and python/flask.
2. Who should I contact with questions? Please email Pedro Rodriguez at me@pedro.ai

Curiosity is released under CC-BY-NC-4.0, see LICENSE for details.