The COVID-19 pandemic has made a huge global impact and cost millions of lives. As COVID-19 vaccines were rolled out, they were quickly met with widespread hesitancy. To address the concerns of hesitant people, we launched VIRA, a public dialogue system aimed at addressing questions and concerns surrounding the COVID-19 vaccines. Here, we release VIRADialogs, a dataset of over 8k dialogues conducted by actual users with VIRA, providing a unique real-world conversational dataset. In light of rapid changes in users' intents, due to updates in guidelines or in response to new information, we highlight the important task of intent discovery in this use-case. We introduce a novel automatic evaluation framework for intent discovery, leveraging the existing intent classifier of VIRA. We use this framework to report baseline intent discovery results over VIRADialogs, that highlight the difficulty of this task.

We are pleased to welcome Dr. Ricardo Baeza-Yates to the NTENT Team! Ricardo will play a key role in fortifying NTENT's innovation leadership in semantic and natural language processing and in shaping the company's technology vision. Get to know a little more about him. You have significant experience in the search space; can you please tell us a little bit about your background? I did my PhD at Univ. of Waterloo on search algorithms related to the New Oxford English Dictionary project. At that time, the dictionary was the largest single file on the planet (a bit more than 500Mb) and searching through it was a challenge.