Disentangling Language and Knowledge in Task-Oriented Dialogs

Dinesh Raghu, Nikhil Gupta, Mausam


Abstract
The Knowledge Base (KB) used for real-world applications, such as booking a movie or restaurant reservation, keeps changing over time. End-to-end neural networks trained for these task-oriented dialogs are expected to be immune to any changes in the KB. However, existing approaches breakdown when asked to handle such changes. We propose an encoder-decoder architecture (BoSsNet) with a novel Bag-of-Sequences (BoSs) memory, which facilitates the disentangled learning of the response’s language model and its knowledge incorporation. Consequently, the KB can be modified with new knowledge without a drop in interpretability. We find that BoSsNeT outperforms state-of-the-art models, with considerable improvements (>10%) on bAbI OOV test sets and other human-human datasets. We also systematically modify existing datasets to measure disentanglement and show BoSsNeT to be robust to KB modifications.
Anthology ID:
N19-1126
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Jill Burstein, Christy Doran, Thamar Solorio
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1239–1255
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1126
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N19-1126
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Dinesh Raghu, Nikhil Gupta, and Mausam. 2019. Disentangling Language and Knowledge in Task-Oriented Dialogs. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), pages 1239–1255, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Disentangling Language and Knowledge in Task-Oriented Dialogs (Raghu et al., NAACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/autopr/N19-1126.pdf
Software:
 N19-1126.Software.zip
Code
 dair-iitd/BossNet