Training Neural Response Selection for Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems
Matthew Henderson, Ivan Vulić, Daniela Gerz, Iñigo Casanueva, Paweł Budzianowski, Sam Coope, Georgios Spithourakis, Tsung-Hsien Wen, Nikola Mrkšić, Pei-Hao Su
Abstract
Despite their popularity in the chatbot literature, retrieval-based models have had modest impact on task-oriented dialogue systems, with the main obstacle to their application being the low-data regime of most task-oriented dialogue tasks. Inspired by the recent success of pretraining in language modelling, we propose an effective method for deploying response selection in task-oriented dialogue. To train response selection models for task-oriented dialogue tasks, we propose a novel method which: 1) pretrains the response selection model on large general-domain conversational corpora; and then 2) fine-tunes the pretrained model for the target dialogue domain, relying only on the small in-domain dataset to capture the nuances of the given dialogue domain. Our evaluation on five diverse application domains, ranging from e-commerce to banking, demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed training method.- Anthology ID:
- P19-1536
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2019
- Address:
- Florence, Italy
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 5392–5404
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/P19-1536
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/P19-1536
- Cite (ACL):
- Matthew Henderson, Ivan Vulić, Daniela Gerz, Iñigo Casanueva, Paweł Budzianowski, Sam Coope, Georgios Spithourakis, Tsung-Hsien Wen, Nikola Mrkšić, and Pei-Hao Su. 2019. Training Neural Response Selection for Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 5392–5404, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Training Neural Response Selection for Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems (Henderson et al., ACL 2019)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/P19-1536.pdf