"Hiding in Plain Sight": Designing Synthetic Dialog Generation for Uncovering Socially Situated Norms

Naturally situated conversations capture the underlying social norms appropriate for the topic of conversation, the relationship between interlocutors and their communicative intent. This paper proposes a framework for controlled generation of dialogues, spanning a wide range of interlocutors attributes (such as age group, profession and personality types), relationship types, conversation topics and conversational trajectories. We use this framework to generate NormHint, a collection of dialogues consistent with these rich settings and analyzed for norm violation leading to conflicts, and potential steps for avoiding these conflicts by adhering to social norms and preferring respectful utterances maintaining the communicative intents of the original utterance. We present the results of human validation and automated analysis of NormHint and show it captures a wide range of conversational topics and scored highly by humans for the naturalness of the conversations based on the prompted context.