GECOR: An End-to-End Generative Ellipsis and Co-reference Resolution Model for Task-Oriented Dialogue

Jun Quan, Deyi Xiong, Bonnie Webber, Changjian Hu

Abstract
Ellipsis and co-reference are common and ubiquitous especially in multi-turn dialogues. In this paper, we treat the resolution of ellipsis and co-reference in dialogue as a problem of generating omitted or referred expressions from the dialogue context. We therefore propose a unified end-to-end Generative Ellipsis and CO-reference Resolution model (GECOR) in the context of dialogue. The model can generate a new pragmatically complete user utterance by alternating the generation and copy mode for each user utterance. A multi-task learning framework is further proposed to integrate the GECOR into an end-to-end task-oriented dialogue. In order to train both the GECOR and the multi-task learning framework, we manually construct a new dataset on the basis of the public dataset CamRest676 with both ellipsis and co-reference annotation. On this dataset, intrinsic evaluations on the resolution of ellipsis and co-reference show that the GECOR model significantly outperforms the sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) baseline model in terms of EM, BLEU and F1 while extrinsic evaluations on the downstream dialogue task demonstrate that our multi-task learning framework with GECOR achieves a higher success rate of task completion than TSCP, a state-of-the-art end-to-end task-oriented dialogue model.
Anthology ID:
D19-1462
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:
4547–4557
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1462
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1462
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jun Quan, Deyi Xiong, Bonnie Webber, and Changjian Hu. 2019. GECOR: An End-to-End Generative Ellipsis and Co-reference Resolution Model for Task-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 4547–4557, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
GECOR: An End-to-End Generative Ellipsis and Co-reference Resolution Model for Task-Oriented Dialogue (Quan et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/naacl24-info/D19-1462.pdf
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