Recommendation as a Communication Game: Self-Supervised Bot-Play for Goal-oriented Dialogue

Dongyeop Kang, Anusha Balakrishnan, Pararth Shah, Paul Crook, Y-Lan Boureau, Jason Weston


Abstract
Traditional recommendation systems produce static rather than interactive recommendations invariant to a user’s specific requests, clarifications, or current mood, and can suffer from the cold-start problem if their tastes are unknown. These issues can be alleviated by treating recommendation as an interactive dialogue task instead, where an expert recommender can sequentially ask about someone’s preferences, react to their requests, and recommend more appropriate items. In this work, we collect a goal-driven recommendation dialogue dataset (GoRecDial), which consists of 9,125 dialogue games and 81,260 conversation turns between pairs of human workers recommending movies to each other. The task is specifically designed as a cooperative game between two players working towards a quantifiable common goal. We leverage the dataset to develop an end-to-end dialogue system that can simultaneously converse and recommend. Models are first trained to imitate the behavior of human players without considering the task goal itself (supervised training). We then finetune our models on simulated bot-bot conversations between two paired pre-trained models (bot-play), in order to achieve the dialogue goal. Our experiments show that models finetuned with bot-play learn improved dialogue strategies, reach the dialogue goal more often when paired with a human, and are rated as more consistent by humans compared to models trained without bot-play. The dataset and code are publicly available through the ParlAI framework.
Anthology ID:
D19-1203
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1951–1961
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1203
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1203
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Dongyeop Kang, Anusha Balakrishnan, Pararth Shah, Paul Crook, Y-Lan Boureau, and Jason Weston. 2019. Recommendation as a Communication Game: Self-Supervised Bot-Play for Goal-oriented Dialogue. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 1951–1961, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Recommendation as a Communication Game: Self-Supervised Bot-Play for Goal-oriented Dialogue (Kang et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/auto-file-uploads/D19-1203.pdf
Attachment:
 D19-1203.Attachment.pdf
Code
 facebookresearch/ParlAI
Data
ReDial