In this paper, we study the problem of addressee and response selection in multi-party conversations. Understanding multi-party conversations is challenging because of complex speaker interactions: multiple speakers exchange messages with each other, playing different roles (sender, addressee, observer), and these roles vary across turns. To tackle this challenge, we propose the Speaker Interaction Recurrent Neural Network (SI-RNN). Whereas the previous state-of-the-art system updated speaker embeddings only for the sender, SI-RNN uses a novel dialog encoder to update speaker embeddings in a role-sensitive way. Additionally, unlike the previous work that selected the addressee and response separately, SI-RNN selects them jointly by viewing the task as a sequence prediction problem. Experimental results show that SI-RNN significantly improves the accuracy of addressee and response selection, particularly in complex conversations with many speakers and responses to distant messages many turns in the past.
Furthermore, several other papers are recently presented focusing on modeling role-specific information given the dialogue contexts @cite_4 @cite_9 @cite_11 . For example, combine content and temporal information to predict the utterance speaker. By contrast, our SIRNN explicitly utilizes the speaker interaction to maintain speaker embeddings and predicts the addressee and response by joint selection.
@cite_9 @cite_4 @cite_11
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We describe a statistical approach for modeling dialogue acts in conversational speech, i.e., speech-act-like units such as STATEMENT, QUESTION, BACKCHANNEL, AGREEMENT, DISAGREEMENT, and APOLOGY. Our model detects and predicts dialogue acts based on lexical, collocational, and prosodic cues, as well as on the discourse coherence of the dialogue act sequence. The dialogue model is based on treating the discourse structure of a conversation as a hidden Markov model and the individual dialogue acts as observations emanating from the model states. Constraints on the likely sequence of dialogue acts are modeled via a dialogue act n-gram. The statistical dialogue grammar is combined with word n-grams, decision trees, and neural networks modeling the idiosyncratic lexical and prosodic manifestations of each dialogue act. We develop a probabilistic integration of speech recognition with dialogue modeling, to improve both speech recognition and dialogue act classification accuracy. Models are trained and evaluated using a large hand-labeled database of 1,155 conversations from the Switchboard corpus of spontaneous human-to-human telephone speech. We achieved good dialogue act labeling accuracy (65 based on errorful, automatically recognized words and prosody, and 71 based on word transcripts, compared to a chance baseline accuracy of 35 and human accuracy of 84 ) and a small reduction in word recognition error. We study response selection for multi-turn conversation in retrieval-based chatbots. Existing work either concatenates utterances in context or matches a response with a highly abstract context vector finally, which may lose relationships among utterances or important contextual information. We propose a sequential matching network (SMN) to address both problems. SMN first matches a response with each utterance in the context on multiple levels of granularity, and distills important matching information from each pair as a vector with convolution and pooling operations. The vectors are then accumulated in a chronological order through a recurrent neural network (RNN) which models relationships among utterances. The final matching score is calculated with the hidden states of the RNN. An empirical study on two public data sets shows that SMN can significantly outperform state-of-the-art methods for response selection in multi-turn conversation. While the study of the connection between discourse patterns and personal identification is decades old, the study of these patterns using language technologies is relatively recent. In that more recent tradition we frame author age prediction from text as a regression problem. We explore the same task using three very different genres of data simultaneously: blogs, telephone conversations, and online forum posts. We employ a technique from domain adaptation that allows us to train a joint model involving all three corpora together as well as separately and analyze differences in predictive features across joint and corpus-specific aspects of the model. Effective features include both stylistic ones (such as POS patterns) as well as content oriented ones. Using a linear regression model based on shallow text features, we obtain correlations up to 0.74 and mean absolute errors between 4.1 and 6.8 years. We model coherent conversation continuation via RNN-based dialogue models equipped with a dynamic attention mechanism. Our attention-RNN language model dynamically increases the scope of attention on the history as the conversation continues, as opposed to standard attention (or alignment) models with a fixed input scope in a sequence-to-sequence model. This allows each generated word to be associated with the most relevant words in its corresponding conversation history. We evaluate the model on two popular dialogue datasets, the open-domain MovieTriples dataset and the closed-domain Ubuntu Troubleshoot dataset, and achieve significant improvements over the state-of-the-art and baselines on several metrics, including complementary diversity-based metrics, human evaluation, and qualitative visualizations. We also show that a vanilla RNN with dynamic attention outperforms more complex memory models (e.g., LSTM and GRU) by allowing for flexible, long-distance memory. We promote further coherence via topic modeling-based reranking.