Improving Open-Domain Dialogue Systems via Multi-Turn Incomplete Utterance Restoration

Zhufeng Pan, Kun Bai, Yan Wang, Lianqiang Zhou, Xiaojiang Liu

Abstract
In multi-turn dialogue, utterances do not always take the full form of sentences. These incomplete utterances will greatly reduce the performance of open-domain dialogue systems. Restoring more incomplete utterances from context could potentially help the systems generate more relevant responses. To facilitate the study of incomplete utterance restoration for open-domain dialogue systems, a large-scale multi-turn dataset Restoration-200K is collected and manually labeled with the explicit relation between an utterance and its context. We also propose a “pick-and-combine” model to restore the incomplete utterance from its context. Experimental results demonstrate that the annotated dataset and the proposed approach significantly boost the response quality of both single-turn and multi-turn dialogue systems.
Anthology ID:
D19-1191
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:
1824–1833
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1191
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1191
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhufeng Pan, Kun Bai, Yan Wang, Lianqiang Zhou, and Xiaojiang Liu. 2019. Improving Open-Domain Dialogue Systems via Multi-Turn Incomplete Utterance Restoration. 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 1824–1833, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Improving Open-Domain Dialogue Systems via Multi-Turn Incomplete Utterance Restoration (Pan et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-3/D19-1191.pdf
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