Task-Oriented Conversation Generation Using Heterogeneous Memory Networks

Zehao Lin, Xinjing Huang, Feng Ji, Haiqing Chen, Yin Zhang

Abstract
How to incorporate external knowledge into a neural dialogue model is critically important for dialogue systems to behave like real humans. To handle this problem, memory networks are usually a great choice and a promising way. However, existing memory networks do not perform well when leveraging heterogeneous information from different sources. In this paper, we propose a novel and versatile external memory networks called Heterogeneous Memory Networks (HMNs), to simultaneously utilize user utterances, dialogue history and background knowledge tuples. In our method, historical sequential dialogues are encoded and stored into the context-aware memory enhanced by gating mechanism while grounding knowledge tuples are encoded and stored into the context-free memory. During decoding, the decoder augmented with HMNs recurrently selects each word in one response utterance from these two memories and a general vocabulary. Experimental results on multiple real-world datasets show that HMNs significantly outperform the state-of-the-art data-driven task-oriented dialogue models in most domains.
Anthology ID:
D19-1463
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
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, Xiaojun Wan
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4558–4567
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1463
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1463
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zehao Lin, Xinjing Huang, Feng Ji, Haiqing Chen, and Yin Zhang. 2019. Task-Oriented Conversation Generation Using Heterogeneous Memory Networks. 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 4558–4567, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Task-Oriented Conversation Generation Using Heterogeneous Memory Networks (Lin et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ml4al-ingestion/D19-1463.pdf
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