Retrieval-free Knowledge Injection through Multi-Document Traversal for Dialogue Models

Rui Wang, Jianzhu Bao, Fei Mi, Yi Chen, Hongru Wang, Yasheng Wang, Yitong Li, Lifeng Shang, Kam-Fai Wong, Ruifeng Xu


Abstract
Dialogue models are often enriched with extensive external knowledge to provide informative responses through a retrieval-augmented pipeline. Nevertheless, retrieval-augmented approaches rely on finely annotated retrieval training data and knowledge-grounded response generation data, making it costly to transfer. To tackle this challenge, this paper proposed a retrieval-free approach, KiDG, by automatically turning knowledge documents into simulated multi-turn dialogues through a Multi-Document Traversal algorithm. The simulated knowledge-intensive dialogues constructed by KiDG in one domain can be easily used to train and enhance pre-trained dialogue models’ knowledge w.r.t. this domain without costly annotation. We conduct extensive experiments comparing retrieval-augmented models and a variety of retrieval-free models. We found that dialogue models enhanced with data simulated with KiDG largely outperform state-of-the-art retrieval-free methods, and it achieves comparable performance compared to retrieval-augmented methods while being better, and cheaper at domain transfer.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.364
Original:
2023.acl-long.364v1
Version 2:
2023.acl-long.364v2
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6608–6619
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.364
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.364
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Rui Wang, Jianzhu Bao, Fei Mi, Yi Chen, Hongru Wang, Yasheng Wang, Yitong Li, Lifeng Shang, Kam-Fai Wong, and Ruifeng Xu. 2023. Retrieval-free Knowledge Injection through Multi-Document Traversal for Dialogue Models. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 6608–6619, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Retrieval-free Knowledge Injection through Multi-Document Traversal for Dialogue Models (Wang et al., ACL 2023)
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