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arXiv · 1909.01296

PolyResponse: A Rank-based Approach to Task-Oriented Dialogue with Application in Restaurant Search and Booking

Matthew Henderson·Ivan Vulić·Iñigo Casanueva·Paweł Budzianowski·Daniela Gerz·Sam Coope·Georgios Spithourakis·Tsung-Hsien Wen·Nikola Mrkšić·Pei-Hao Su
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Abstract

We present PolyResponse, a conversational search engine that supports task-oriented dialogue. It is a retrieval-based approach that bypasses the complex multi-component design of traditional task-oriented dialogue systems and the use of explicit semantics in the form of task-specific ontologies. The PolyResponse engine is trained on hundreds of millions of examples extracted from real conversations: it learns what responses are appropriate in different conversational contexts. It then ranks a large index of text and visual responses according to their similarity to the given context, and narrows down the list of relevant entities during the multi-turn conversation. We introduce a restaurant search and booking system powered by the PolyResponse engine, currently available in 8 different languages.

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Matthew Henderson, Ivan Vulić, Iñigo Casanueva, Paweł Budzianowski, Daniela Gerz, Sam Coope, Georgios Spithourakis, Tsung-Hsien Wen, Nikola Mrkšić, Pei-Hao Su. 2019-09-03. PolyResponse: A Rank-based Approach to Task-Oriented Dialogue with Application in Restaurant Search and Booking. https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.01296

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