Unstructured Knowledge Access in Task-oriented Dialog Modeling using Language Inference, Knowledge Retrieval and Knowledge-Integrative Response Generation

Mudit Chaudhary; Borislav Dzodzo; Sida Huang; Chun Hei Lo; Mingzhi Lyu; Lun Yiu Nie; Jinbo Xing; Tianhua Zhang; Xiaoying Zhang; Jingyan Zhou; Hong Cheng; Wai Lam; Helen Meng

arXiv · 2101.06066

Unstructured Knowledge Access in Task-oriented Dialog Modeling using Language Inference, Knowledge Retrieval and Knowledge-Integrative Response Generation

Mudit Chaudhary·Borislav Dzodzo·Sida Huang·Chun Hei Lo·Mingzhi Lyu·Lun Yiu Nie·Jinbo Xing·Tianhua Zhang·Xiaoying Zhang·Jingyan Zhou·Hong Cheng·Wai Lam·Helen Meng

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Abstract

Dialog systems enriched with external knowledge can handle user queries that are outside the scope of the supporting databases/APIs. In this paper, we follow the baseline provided in DSTC9 Track 1 and propose three subsystems, KDEAK, KnowleDgEFactor, and Ens-GPT, which form the pipeline for a task-oriented dialog system capable of accessing unstructured knowledge. Specifically, KDEAK performs knowledge-seeking turn detection by formulating the problem as natural language inference using knowledge from dialogs, databases and FAQs. KnowleDgEFactor accomplishes the knowledge selection task by formulating a factorized knowledge/document retrieval problem with three modules performing domain, entity and knowledge level analyses. Ens-GPT generates a response by first processing multiple knowledge snippets, followed by an ensemble algorithm that decides if the response should be solely derived from a GPT2-XL model, or regenerated in combination with the top-ranking knowledge snippet. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed pipeline system outperforms the baseline and generates high-quality responses, achieving at least 58.77% improvement on BLEU-4 score.

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Mudit Chaudhary, Borislav Dzodzo, Sida Huang, Chun Hei Lo, Mingzhi Lyu, Lun Yiu Nie, Jinbo Xing, Tianhua Zhang, Xiaoying Zhang, Jingyan Zhou, Hong Cheng, Wai Lam, Helen Meng. 2021-01-15. Unstructured Knowledge Access in Task-oriented Dialog Modeling using Language Inference, Knowledge Retrieval and Knowledge-Integrative Response Generation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.06066

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