@inproceedings{wang-etal-2020-response,
    title = "Response Selection for Multi-Party Conversations with Dynamic Topic Tracking",
    author = "Wang, Weishi  and
      Hoi, Steven C.H.  and
      Joty, Shafiq",
    editor = "Webber, Bonnie  and
      Cohn, Trevor  and
      He, Yulan  and
      Liu, Yang",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)",
    month = nov,
    year = "2020",
    address = "Online",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/add-emnlp-2024-awards/2020.emnlp-main.533/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.533",
    pages = "6581--6591",
    abstract = "While participants in a multi-party multi-turn conversation simultaneously engage in multiple conversation topics, existing response selection methods are developed mainly focusing on a two-party single-conversation scenario. Hence, the prolongation and transition of conversation topics are ignored by current methods. In this work, we frame response selection as a dynamic topic tracking task to match the topic between the response and relevant conversation context. With this new formulation, we propose a novel multi-task learning framework that supports efficient encoding through large pretrained models with only two utterances at once to perform dynamic topic disentanglement and response selection. We also propose Topic-BERT an essential pretraining step to embed topic information into BERT with self-supervised learning. Experimental results on the DSTC-8 Ubuntu IRC dataset show state-of-the-art results in response selection and topic disentanglement tasks outperforming existing methods by a good margin."
}