Neural network models are capable of generating extremely natural sounding conversational interactions. Nevertheless, these models have yet to demonstrate that they can incorporate content in the form of factual information or entity-grounded opinion that would enable them to serve in more task-oriented conversational applications. This paper presents a novel, fully data-driven, and knowledge-grounded neural conversation model aimed at producing more contentful responses without slot filling. We generalize the widely-used Seq2Seq approach by conditioning responses on both conversation history and external "facts", allowing the model to be versatile and applicable in an open-domain setting. Our approach yields significant improvements over a competitive Seq2Seq baseline. Human judges found that our outputs are significantly more informative.
This work should be seen as distinct from more goal-directed neural dialog modeling in which question-answer slots are explicitly learned from small amounts of crowd-sourced data, customer support logs, or user data @cite_17 @cite_0 @cite_29 @cite_35 . In many respects, that paradigm can be characterized as the neural extension of conventional dialog models with or without statistical modeling, e.g., @cite_13 @cite_23 @cite_21 @cite_28 . Our purpose is to explore the space of less clearly goal-directed, but nonetheless informative (i.e., informational) conversation that does not demand explicit slot-filling.
@cite_35 @cite_28 @cite_29 @cite_21 @cite_0 @cite_23 @cite_13 @cite_17
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User simulation is frequently used to train statistical dialog managers for task-oriented domains. At present, goal-driven simulators (those that have a persistent notion of what they wish to achieve in the dialog) require some task-specific engineering, making them impossible to evaluate intrinsically. Instead, they have been evaluated extrinsically by means of the dialog managers they are intended to train, leading to circularity of argument. In this paper, we propose the first fully generative goal-driven simulator that is fully induced from data, without hand-crafting or goal annotation. Our goals are latent, and take the form of topics in a topic model, clustering together semantically equivalent and phonetically confusable strings, implicitly modelling synonymy and speech recognition noise. We evaluate on two standard dialog resources, the Communicator and Let's Go datasets, and demonstrate that our model has substantially better fit to held out data than competing approaches. We also show that features derived from our model allow significantly greater improvement over a baseline at distinguishing real from randomly permuted dialogs. The main goal of modeling human conversation is to create agents which can interact with people in both open-ended and goal-oriented scenarios. End-to-end trained neural dialog systems are an important line of research for such generalized dialog models as they do not resort to any situation-specific handcrafting of rules. However, incorporating personalization into such systems is a largely unexplored topic as there are no existing corpora to facilitate such work. In this paper, we present a new dataset of goal-oriented dialogs which are influenced by speaker profiles attached to them. We analyze the shortcomings of an existing end-to-end dialog system based on Memory Networks and propose modifications to the architecture which enable personalization. We also investigate personalization in dialog as a multi-task learning problem, and show that a single model which shares features among various profiles outperforms separate models for each profile. Neural network models are capable of generating extremely natural sounding conversational interactions. Nevertheless, these models have yet to demonstrate that they can incorporate content in the form of factual information or entity-grounded opinion that would enable them to serve in more task-oriented conversational applications. This paper presents a novel, fully data-driven, and knowledge-grounded neural conversation model aimed at producing more contentful responses without slot filling. We generalize the widely-used Seq2Seq approach by conditioning responses on both conversation history and external "facts", allowing the model to be versatile and applicable in an open-domain setting. Our approach yields significant improvements over a competitive Seq2Seq baseline. Human judges found that our outputs are significantly more informative. Goal-oriented dialogue has been paid attention for its numerous applications in artificial intelligence. To solve this task, deep learning and reinforcement learning have recently been applied. However, these approaches struggle to find a competent recurrent neural questioner, owing to the complexity of learning a series of sentences. Motivated by theory of mind, we propose "Answerer in Questioner's Mind" (AQM), a novel algorithm for goal-oriented dialogue. With AQM, a questioner asks and infers based on an approximated probabilistic model of the answerer. The questioner figures out the answerer's intent via selecting a plausible question by explicitly calculating the information gain of the candidate intentions and possible answers to each question. We test our framework on two goal-oriented visual dialogue tasks: "MNIST Counting Dialog" and "GuessWhat?!." In our experiments, AQM outperforms comparative algorithms and makes human-like dialogue. We further use AQM as a tool for analyzing the mechanism of deep reinforcement learning approach and discuss the future direction of practical goal-oriented neural dialogue systems.