Natural language generation (NLG) plays a critical role in spoken dialogue systems. This paper presents a new approach to NLG by using recurrent neural networks (RNN), in which a gating mechanism is applied before RNN computation. This allows the proposed model to generate appropriate sentences. The RNN-based generator can be learned from unaligned data by jointly training sentence planning and surface realization to produce natural language responses. The model was extensively evaluated on four different NLG domains. The results show that the proposed generator achieved better performance on all the NLG domains compared to previous generators.
Most previous work on trainable language generation has focused on two paradigms: (a) using a generation decisions of an existing generator. Both approaches rely on the existence of a handcrafted generation component, which is likely to limit their scalability to new domains. The first contribution of this article is to present Bagel, a fully data-driven generation method that treats the language generation task as a search for the most likely sequence of semantic concepts and realization phrases, according to Factored Language Models (FLMs). As domain utterances are not readily available for most natural language generation tasks, a large creative effort is required to produce the data necessary to represent human linguistic variation for nontrivial domains. This article is based on the assumption that learning to produce paraphrases can be facilitated by collecting data from a large sample of untrained annotators using crowdsourcing—rather than a few domain experts—by relying on a coarse meaning representation. A second contribution of this article is to use crowdsourced data to show how dialogue naturalness can be improved by learning to vary the output utterances generated for a given semantic input. Two data-driven methods for generating paraphrases in dialogue are presented: (a) by sampling from the n-best list of realizations produced by Bagel's FLM reranker; and (b) by learning a structured perceptron predicting whether candidate realizations are valid paraphrases. We train Bagel on a set of 1,956 utterances produced by 137 annotators, which covers 10 types of dialogue acts and 128 semantic concepts in a tourist information system for Cambridge. An automated evaluation shows that Bagel outperforms utterance class LM baselines on this domain. A human evaluation of 600 resynthesized dialogue extracts shows that Bagel's FLM output produces utterances comparable to a handcrafted baseline, whereas the perceptron classifier performs worse. Interestingly, human judges find the system sampling from the n-best list to be more natural than a system always returning the first-best utterance. The judges are also more willing to interact with the n-best system in the future. These results suggest that capturing the large variation found in human language using data-driven methods is beneficial for dialogue interaction. We present three systems for surface natural language generation that are trainable from annotated corpora. The first two systems, called NLG1 and NLG2, require a corpus marked only with domain-specific semantic attributes, while the last system, called NLG3, requires a corpus marked with both semantic attributes and syntactic dependency information. All systems attempt to produce a grammatical natural language phrase from a domain-specific semantic representation. NLG1 serves a baseline system and uses phrase frequencies to generate a whole phrase in one step, while NLG2 and NLG3 use maximum entropy probability models to individually generate each word in the phrase. The systems NLG2 and NLG3 learn to determine both the word choice and the word order of the phrase. We present experiments in which we generate phrases to describe flights in the air travel domain. A challenging problem for spoken dialog systems is the design of utterance generation modules that are fast, flexible and general, yet produce high quality output in particular domains. A promising approach is trainable generation, which uses general-purpose linguistic knowledge automatically adapted to the application domain. This paper presents a trainable sentence planner for the MATCH dialog system. We show that trainable sentence planning can produce output comparable to that of MATCH's template-based generator even for quite complex information presentations. The two current approaches to language generation, template-based and rule-based (linguistic) NLG, have limitations when applied to spoken dialogue systems, in part because they were developed for text generation. In this paper, we propose a new corpus-based approach to natural language generation, specifically designed for spoken dialogue systems.