Retrieve and Refine: Improved Sequence Generation Models For Dialogue

Jason Weston, Emily Dinan, Alexander Miller


Abstract
Sequence generation models for dialogue are known to have several problems: they tend to produce short, generic sentences that are uninformative and unengaging. Retrieval models on the other hand can surface interesting responses, but are restricted to the given retrieval set leading to erroneous replies that cannot be tuned to the specific context. In this work we develop a model that combines the two approaches to avoid both their deficiencies: first retrieve a response and then refine it – the final sequence generator treating the retrieval as additional context. We show on the recent ConvAI2 challenge task our approach produces responses superior to both standard retrieval and generation models in human evaluations.
Anthology ID:
W18-5713
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2018 EMNLP Workshop SCAI: The 2nd International Workshop on Search-Oriented Conversational AI
Month:
October
Year:
2018
Address:
Brussels, Belgium
Editors:
Aleksandr Chuklin, Jeff Dalton, Julia Kiseleva, Alexey Borisov, Mikhail Burtsev
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
87–92
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-5713
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W18-5713
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jason Weston, Emily Dinan, and Alexander Miller. 2018. Retrieve and Refine: Improved Sequence Generation Models For Dialogue. In Proceedings of the 2018 EMNLP Workshop SCAI: The 2nd International Workshop on Search-Oriented Conversational AI, pages 87–92, Brussels, Belgium. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Retrieve and Refine: Improved Sequence Generation Models For Dialogue (Weston et al., EMNLP 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-2/W18-5713.pdf