  Personal knowledge bases (PKBs) are crucial for a broad range of applications
such as personalized recommendation and Web-based chatbots. A critical
challenge to build PKBs is extracting personal attribute knowledge from users'
conversation data. Given some users of a conversational system, a personal
attribute and these users' utterances, our goal is to predict the ranking of
the given personal attribute values for each user. Previous studies often rely
on a relative number of resources such as labeled utterances and external data,
yet the attribute knowledge embedded in unlabeled utterances is underutilized
and their performance of predicting some difficult personal attributes is still
unsatisfactory. In addition, it is found that some text classification methods
could be employed to resolve this task directly. However, they also perform not
well over those difficult personal attributes. In this paper, we propose a
novel framework PEARL to predict personal attributes from conversations by
leveraging the abundant personal attribute knowledge from utterances under a
low-resource setting in which no labeled utterances or external data are
utilized. PEARL combines the biterm semantic information with the word
co-occurrence information seamlessly via employing the updated prior attribute
knowledge to refine the biterm topic model's Gibbs sampling process in an
iterative manner. The extensive experimental results show that PEARL
outperforms all the baseline methods not only on the task of personal attribute
prediction from conversations over two data sets, but also on the more general
weakly supervised text classification task over one data set.
