Neural conversational models require substantial amounts of dialogue data for their parameter estimation and are therefore usually learned on large corpora such as chat forums or movie subtitles. These corpora are, however, often challenging to work with, notably due to their frequent lack of turn segmentation and the presence of multiple references external to the dialogue itself. This paper shows that these challenges can be mitigated by adding a weighting model into the architecture. The weighting model, which is itself estimated from dialogue data, associates each training example to a numerical weight that reflects its intrinsic quality for dialogue modelling. At training time, these sample weights are included into the empirical loss to be minimised. Evaluation results on retrieval-based models trained on movie and TV subtitles demonstrate that the inclusion of such a weighting model improves the model performance on unsupervised metrics.
Neural conversation models are a family of neural architectures (generally based on deep convolutional or recurrent networks) used to represent mappings between dialogue contexts (or queries) and possible responses. Compared to previous statistical approaches to dialogue modelling based on Markov processes @cite_28 @cite_19 @cite_1 , one benefit of these neural models is their ability to be estimated from raw dialogue corpora, without having to rely on additional annotation layers for intermediate representations such as state variables or dialogue acts. Rather, neural conversation models automatically derive latent representations of the dialogue state based on the observed utterances.
@cite_28 @cite_19 @cite_1
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Dialogue Act recognition associate dialogue acts (i.e., semantic labels) to utterances in a conversation. The problem of associating semantic labels to utterances can be treated as a sequence labeling problem. In this work, we build a hierarchical recurrent neural network using bidirectional LSTM as a base unit and the conditional random field (CRF) as the top layer to classify each utterance into its corresponding dialogue act. The hierarchical network learns representations at multiple levels, i.e., word level, utterance level, and conversation level. The conversation level representations are input to the CRF layer, which takes into account not only all previous utterances but also their dialogue acts, thus modeling the dependency among both, labels and utterances, an important consideration of natural dialogue. We validate our approach on two different benchmark data sets, Switchboard and Meeting Recorder Dialogue Act, and show performance improvement over the state-of-the-art methods by @math and @math absolute points, respectively. It is worth noting that the inter-annotator agreement on Switchboard data set is @math , and our method is able to achieve the accuracy of about @math despite being trained on the noisy data. Dialogue act recognition is an important part of natural language understanding. We investigate the way dialogue act corpora are annotated and the learning approaches used so far. We find that the dialogue act is context-sensitive within the conversation for most of the classes. Nevertheless, previous models of dialogue act classification work on the utterance-level and only very few consider context. We propose a novel context-based learning method to classify dialogue acts using a character-level language model utterance representation, and we notice significant improvement. We evaluate this method on the Switchboard Dialogue Act corpus, and our results show that the consideration of the preceding utterances as a context of the current utterance improves dialogue act detection. 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. Sequential data often possesses a hierarchical structure with complex dependencies between subsequences, such as found between the utterances in a dialogue. In an effort to model this kind of generative process, we propose a neural network-based generative architecture, with latent stochastic variables that span a variable number of time steps. We apply the proposed model to the task of dialogue response generation and compare it with recent neural network architectures. We evaluate the model performance through automatic evaluation metrics and by carrying out a human evaluation. The experiments demonstrate that our model improves upon recently proposed models and that the latent variables facilitate the generation of long outputs and maintain the context. We investigate the task of building open domain, conversational dialogue systems based on large dialogue corpora using generative models. Generative models produce system responses that are autonomously generated word-by-word, opening up the possibility for realistic, flexible interactions. In support of this goal, we extend the recently proposed hierarchical recurrent encoder-decoder neural network to the dialogue domain, and demonstrate that this model is competitive with state-of-the-art neural language models and back-off n-gram models. We investigate the limitations of this and similar approaches, and show how its performance can be improved by bootstrapping the learning from a larger question-answer pair corpus and from pretrained word embeddings. We investigate the task of building open domain, conversational dialogue systems based on large dialogue corpora using generative models. Generative models produce system responses that are autonomously generated word-by-word, opening up the possibility for realistic, flexible interactions. In support of this goal, we extend the recently proposed hierarchical recurrent encoder-decoder neural network to the dialogue domain, and demonstrate that this model is competitive with state-of-the-art neural language models and backoff n-gram models. We investigate the limitations of this and similar approaches, and show how its performance can be improved by bootstrapping the learning from a larger question-answer pair corpus and from pretrained word embeddings. We introduce end-to-end neural network based models for simulating users of task-oriented dialogue systems. User simulation in dialogue systems is crucial from two different perspectives: (i) automatic evaluation of different dialogue models, and (ii) training task-oriented dialogue systems. We design a hierarchical sequence-to-sequence model that first encodes the initial user goal and system turns into fixed length representations using Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN). It then encodes the dialogue history using another RNN layer. At each turn, user responses are decoded from the hidden representations of the dialogue level RNN. This hierarchical user simulator (HUS) approach allows the model to capture undiscovered parts of the user goal without the need of an explicit dialogue state tracking. We further develop several variants by utilizing a latent variable model to inject random variations into user responses to promote diversity in simulated user responses and a novel goal regularization mechanism to penalize divergence of user responses from the initial user goal. We evaluate the proposed models on movie ticket booking domain by systematically interacting each user simulator with various dialogue system policies trained with different objectives and users. Recent neural models of dialogue generation offer great promise for generating responses for conversational agents, but tend to be shortsighted, predicting utterances one at a time while ignoring their influence on future outcomes. Modeling the future direction of a dialogue is crucial to generating coherent, interesting dialogues, a need which led traditional NLP models of dialogue to draw on reinforcement learning. In this paper, we show how to integrate these goals, applying deep reinforcement learning to model future reward in chatbot dialogue. The model simulates dialogues between two virtual agents, using policy gradient methods to reward sequences that display three useful conversational properties: informativity (non-repetitive turns), coherence, and ease of answering (related to forward-looking function). We evaluate our model on diversity, length as well as with human judges, showing that the proposed algorithm generates more interactive responses and manages to foster a more sustained conversation in dialogue simulation. This work marks a first step towards learning a neural conversational model based on the long-term success of dialogues. Task-oriented dialogue focuses on conversational agents that participate in user-initiated dialogues on domain-specific topics. In contrast to chatbots, which simply seek to sustain open-ended meaningful discourse, existing task-oriented agents usually explicitly model user intent and belief states. This paper examines bypassing such an explicit representation by depending on a latent neural embedding of state and learning selective attention to dialogue history together with copying to incorporate relevant prior context. We complement recent work by showing the effectiveness of simple sequence-to-sequence neural architectures with a copy mechanism. Our model outperforms more complex memory-augmented models by 7 in per-response generation and is on par with the current state-of-the-art on DSTC2. Developing a dialogue agent that is capable of making autonomous decisions and communicating by natural language is one of the long-term goals of machine learning research. Traditional approaches either rely on hand-crafting a small state-action set for applying reinforcement learning that is not scalable or constructing deterministic models for learning dialogue sentences that fail to capture natural conversational variability. In this paper, we propose a Latent Intention Dialogue Model (LIDM) that employs a discrete latent variable to learn underlying dialogue intentions in the framework of neural variational inference. In a goal-oriented dialogue scenario, these latent intentions can be interpreted as actions guiding the generation of machine responses, which can be further refined autonomously by reinforcement learning. The experimental evaluation of LIDM shows that the model out-performs published benchmarks for both corpus-based and human evaluation, demonstrating the effectiveness of discrete latent variable models for learning goal-oriented dialogues. Dialogue act (DA) recognition is a fundamental step for computers to understand natural-language dialogues because it can reflect the intention of a speaker. However, it is difficult to adapt traditional machine learning models to the dialogue act recognition task due to the heterogeneous features, statistical dependence between the DA tags, and complex relationship between features and the DA tags. In this paper, we propose a new model which combines heterogeneous deep neural networks with conditional random fields (HDNN-CRF) to solve this problem. The proposed model has two main advantages. First, the heterogeneous deep neural networks (HDNN) model, which is extended from the deep neural networks (DNN), retains the powerful ability of representation learning and adds a new skill of dealing with heterogeneous features effectively. Second, the conditional random fields (CRF) can capture the statistical dependence between the DA tags which carries important information to determine the DA tag of the current utterance. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed model, we conduct several experiments on a Chinese corpus, called CASIA-CASSIL corpus. Ten kinds of features are extracted from the utterances. In the experiment, we give some quantitative analysis of these kinds of features. What's more, when comparing classification accuracies of the proposed model and some other models, the proposed model has achieved the best performance. HighlightsThe challenge of dialogue act recognition is discussed.Multi-modal deep neural networks are combined with conditional random fields for dialogue act recognition.Numerical experiments are described and good performance is observed. This paper introduces the Ubuntu Dialogue Corpus, a dataset containing almost 1 million multi-turn dialogues, with a total of over 7 million utterances and 100 million words. This provides a unique resource for research into building dialogue managers based on neural language models that can make use of large amounts of unlabeled data. The dataset has both the multi-turn property of conversations in the Dialog State Tracking Challenge datasets, and the unstructured nature of interactions from microblog services such as Twitter. We also describe two neural learning architectures suitable for analyzing this dataset, and provide benchmark performance on the task of selecting the best next response. Search strategies for generating a response from a neural dialogue model have received relatively little attention compared to improving network architectures and learning algorithms in recent years. In this paper, we consider a standard neural dialogue model based on recurrent networks with an attention mechanism, and focus on evaluating the impact of the search strategy. We compare four search strategies: greedy search, beam search, iterative beam search and iterative beam search followed by selection scoring. We evaluate these strategies using human evaluation of full conversations and compare them using automatic metrics including log-probabilities, scores and diversity metrics. We observe a significant gap between greedy search and the proposed iterative beam search augmented with selection scoring, demonstrating the importance of the search algorithm in neural dialogue generation. In this paper, we construct and train end-to-end neural network-based dialogue systems using an updated version of the recent Ubuntu Dialogue Corpus, a dataset containing almost 1 million multi-turn dialogues, with a total of over 7 million utterances and 100 million words. This dataset is interesting because of its size, long context lengths, and technical nature; thus, it can be used to train large models directly from data with minimal feature engineering, which can be both time consuming and expensive. We provide baselines in two different environments: one where models are trained to maximize the log-likelihood of a generated utterance conditioned on the context of the conversation, and one where models are trained to select the correct next response from a list of candidate responses. These are both evaluated on a recall task that we call Next Utterance Classification (NUC), as well as other generation-specific metrics. Finally, we provide a qualitative error analysis to help determine the most promising directions for future research on the Ubuntu Dialogue Corpus, and for end-to-end dialogue systems in general. We study open domain dialogue generation with dialogue acts designed to explain how people engage in social chat. To imitate human behavior, we propose managing the flow of human-machine interactions with the dialogue acts as policies. The policies and response generation are jointly learned from human-human conversations, and the former is further optimized with a reinforcement learning approach. With the dialogue acts, we achieve significant improvement over state-of-the-art methods on response quality for given contexts and dialogue length in both machine-machine simulation and human-machine conversation. User simulation is essential for generating enough data to train a statistical spoken dialogue system. Previous models for user simulation suffer from several drawbacks, such as the inability to take dialogue history into account, the need of rigid structure to ensure coherent user behaviour, heavy dependence on a specific domain, the inability to output several user intentions during one dialogue turn, or the requirement of a summarized action space for tractability. This paper introduces a data-driven user simulator based on an encoder-decoder recurrent neural network. The model takes as input a sequence of dialogue contexts and outputs a sequence of dialogue acts corresponding to user intentions. The dialogue contexts include information about the machine acts and the status of the user goal. We show on the Dialogue State Tracking Challenge 2 (DSTC2) dataset that the sequence-to-sequence model outperforms an agenda-based simulator and an n-gram simulator, according to F-score. Furthermore, we show how this model can be used on the original action space and thereby models user behaviour with finer granularity. One of the core components of modern spoken dialogue systems is the belief tracker, which estimates the user's goal at every step of the dialogue. However, most current approaches have difficulty scaling to larger, more complex dialogue domains. This is due to their dependency on either: a) Spoken Language Understanding models that require large amounts of annotated training data; or b) hand-crafted lexicons for capturing some of the linguistic variation in users' language. We propose a novel Neural Belief Tracking (NBT) framework which overcomes these problems by building on recent advances in representation learning. NBT models reason over pre-trained word vectors, learning to compose them into distributed representations of user utterances and dialogue context. Our evaluation on two datasets shows that this approach surpasses past limitations, matching the performance of state-of-the-art models which rely on hand-crafted semantic lexicons and outperforming them when such lexicons are not provided. Dialogue state tracking (DST) is a key component of task-oriented dialogue systems. DST estimates the user's goal at each user turn given the interaction until then. State of the art approaches for state tracking rely on deep learning methods, and represent dialogue state as a distribution over all possible slot values for each slot present in the ontology. Such a representation is not scalable when the set of possible values are unbounded (e.g., date, time or location) or dynamic (e.g., movies or usernames). Furthermore, training of such models requires labeled data, where each user turn is annotated with the dialogue state, which makes building models for new domains challenging. In this paper, we present a scalable multi-domain deep learning based approach for DST. We introduce a novel framework for state tracking which is independent of the slot value set, and represent the dialogue state as a distribution over a set of values of interest (candidate set) derived from the dialogue history or knowledge. Restricting these candidate sets to be bounded in size addresses the problem of slot-scalability. Furthermore, by leveraging the slot-independent architecture and transfer learning, we show that our proposed approach facilitates quick adaptation to new domains. A key advantage of taking a statistical approach to spoken dialogue systems is the ability to formalise dialogue policy design as a stochastic optimization problem. However, since dialogue policies are learnt by interactively exploring alternative dialogue paths, conventional static dialogue corpora cannot be used directly for training and instead, a user simulator is commonly used. This paper describes a novel statistical user model based on a compact stack-like state representation called a user agenda which allows state transitions to be modeled as sequences of push- and pop-operations and elegantly encodes the dialogue history from a user's point of view. An expectation-maximisation based algorithm is presented which models the observable user output in terms of a sequence of hidden states and thereby allows the model to be trained on a corpus of minimally annotated data. Experimental results with a real-world dialogue system demonstrate that the trained user model can be successfully used to optimise a dialogue policy which outperforms a hand-crafted baseline in terms of task completion rates and user satisfaction scores. In this paper, we present a novel supervised approach to the problem of summarizing email conversations and modeling dialogue acts. We assume that there is a relationship between dialogue acts and important sentences. Based on this assumption, we introduce a sequential graphical model approach which simultaneously summarizes email conversation and models dialogue acts. We compare our model with sequential and non-sequential models, which independently conduct the tasks of extractive summarization and dialogue act modeling. An empirical evaluation shows that our approach significantly outperforms all baselines in classifying correct summary sentences without losing performance on dialogue act modeling task.