Improving Multi-turn Dialogue Modelling with Utterance ReWriter

Hui Su, Xiaoyu Shen, Rongzhi Zhang, Fei Sun, Pengwei Hu, Cheng Niu, Jie Zhou

Abstract
Recent research has achieved impressive results in single-turn dialogue modelling. In the multi-turn setting, however, current models are still far from satisfactory. One major challenge is the frequently occurred coreference and information omission in our daily conversation, making it hard for machines to understand the real intention. In this paper, we propose rewriting the human utterance as a pre-process to help multi-turn dialgoue modelling. Each utterance is first rewritten to recover all coreferred and omitted information. The next processing steps are then performed based on the rewritten utterance. To properly train the utterance rewriter, we collect a new dataset with human annotations and introduce a Transformer-based utterance rewriting architecture using the pointer network. We show the proposed architecture achieves remarkably good performance on the utterance rewriting task. The trained utterance rewriter can be easily integrated into online chatbots and brings general improvement over different domains.
Anthology ID:
P19-1003
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:
22–31
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1003
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P19-1003
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hui Su, Xiaoyu Shen, Rongzhi Zhang, Fei Sun, Pengwei Hu, Cheng Niu, and Jie Zhou. 2019. Improving Multi-turn Dialogue Modelling with Utterance ReWriter. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 22–31, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Improving Multi-turn Dialogue Modelling with Utterance ReWriter (Su et al., ACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nodalida-main-page/P19-1003.pdf
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