Dialogue summarization has drawn much attention recently. Especially in the customer service domain, agents could use dialogue summaries to help boost their works by quickly knowing customer's issues and service progress. These applications require s
ummaries to contain the perspective of a single speaker and have a clear topic flow structure, while neither are available in existing datasets. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce a novel Chinese dataset for Customer Service Dialogue Summarization (CSDS). CSDS improves the abstractive summaries in two aspects: (1) In addition to the overall summary for the whole dialogue, role-oriented summaries are also provided to acquire different speakers' viewpoints. (2) All the summaries sum up each topic separately, thus containing the topic-level structure of the dialogue. We define tasks in CSDS as generating the overall summary and different role-oriented summaries for a given dialogue. Next, we compare various summarization methods on CSDS, and experiment results show that existing methods are prone to generate redundant and incoherent summaries. Besides, the performance becomes much worse when analyzing the performance on role-oriented summaries and topic structures. We hope that this study could benchmark Chinese dialogue summarization and benefit further studies.
Improving user experience of a dialogue system often requires intensive developer effort to read conversation logs, run statistical analyses, and intuit the relative importance of system shortcomings. This paper presents a novel approach to automated
analysis of conversation logs that learns the relationship between user-system interactions and overall dialogue quality. Unlike prior work on utterance-level quality prediction, our approach learns the impact of each interaction from the overall user rating without utterance-level annotation, allowing resultant model conclusions to be derived on the basis of empirical evidence and at low cost. Our model identifies interactions that have a strong correlation with the overall dialogue quality in a chatbot setting. Experiments show that the automated analysis from our model agrees with expert judgments, making this work the first to show that such weakly-supervised learning of utterance-level quality prediction is highly achievable.
Persuasion dialogue system reflects the machine's ability to make strategic moves beyond verbal communication, and therefore differentiates itself from task-oriented or open-domain dialogues and has its own unique values. However, the repetition and
inconsistency problems still persist in dialogue response generation and could substantially impact user experience and impede the persuasion outcome. Besides, although reinforcement learning (RL) approaches have achieved big success in strategic tasks such as games, it requires a sophisticated user simulator to provide real-time feedback to the dialogue system, which limits the application of RL on persuasion dialogues. To address these issues towards a better persuasion dialogue system, we apply RL to refine a language model baseline without user simulators, and distill sentence-level information about repetition, inconsistency, and task relevance through rewards. Moreover, to better accomplish the persuasion task, the model learns from human demonstration to imitate human persuasion behavior and selects the most persuasive responses. Experiments show that our model outperforms previous state-of-the-art dialogue models on both automatic metrics and human evaluation results on a donation persuasion task, and generates more diverse, consistent and persuasive conversations according to the user feedback. We will make the code and model publicly available.
Multi-party dialogue machine reading comprehension (MRC) brings tremendous challenge since it involves multiple speakers at one dialogue, resulting in intricate speaker information flows and noisy dialogue contexts. To alleviate such difficulties, pr
evious models focus on how to incorporate these information using complex graph-based modules and additional manually labeled data, which is usually rare in real scenarios. In this paper, we design two labour-free self- and pseudo-self-supervised prediction tasks on speaker and key-utterance to implicitly model the speaker information flows, and capture salient clues in a long dialogue. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets have justified the effectiveness of our method over competitive baselines and current state-of-the-art models.
We propose a personalized dialogue scenario generation system which transmits efficient and coherent information with a real-time extractive summarization method optimized by an Ising machine. The summarization problem is formulated as a quadratic un
constraint binary optimization (QUBO) problem, which extracts sentences that maximize the sum of the degree of user's interest in the sentences of documents with the discourse structure of each document and the total utterance time as constraints. To evaluate the proposed method, we constructed a news article corpus with annotations of the discourse structure, users' profiles, and interests in sentences and topics. The experimental results confirmed that a Digital Annealer, which is a simulated annealing-based Ising machine, can solve our QUBO model in a practical time without violating the constraints using this dataset.
Identifying relevant knowledge to be used in conversational systems that are grounded in long documents is critical to effective response generation. We introduce a knowledge identification model that leverages the document structure to provide dialo
gue-contextualized passage encodings and better locate knowledge relevant to the conversation. An auxiliary loss captures the history of dialogue-document connections. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our model on two document-grounded conversational datasets and provide analyses showing generalization to unseen documents and long dialogue contexts.
In task-oriented dialogue systems, recent dialogue state tracking methods tend to perform one-pass generation of the dialogue state based on the previous dialogue state. The mistakes of these models made at the current turn are prone to be carried ov
er to the next turn, causing error propagation. In this paper, we propose a novel Amendable Generation for Dialogue State Tracking (AG-DST), which contains a two-pass generation process: (1) generating a primitive dialogue state based on the dialogue of the current turn and the previous dialogue state, and (2) amending the primitive dialogue state from the first pass. With the additional amending generation pass, our model is tasked to learn more robust dialogue state tracking by amending the errors that still exist in the primitive dialogue state, which plays the role of reviser in the double-checking process and alleviates unnecessary error propagation. Experimental results show that AG-DST significantly outperforms previous works in two active DST datasets (MultiWOZ 2.2 and WOZ 2.0), achieving new state-of-the-art performances.
Recently, the focus of dialogue state tracking has expanded from single domain to multiple domains. The task is characterized by the shared slots between domains. As the scenario gets more complex, the out-of-vocabulary problem also becomes severer.
Current models are not satisfactory for solving the challenges of ontology integration between domains and out-of-vocabulary problems. To address the problem, we explore the hierarchical semantic of ontology and enhance the interrelation between slots with masked hierarchical attention. In state value decoding stage, we solve the out-of-vocabulary problem by combining generation method and extraction method together. We evaluate the performance of our model on two representative datasets, MultiWOZ in English and CrossWOZ in Chinese. The results show that our model yields a significant performance gain over current state-of-the-art state tracking model and it is more robust to out-of-vocabulary problem compared with other methods.
Researches on dialogue empathy aim to endow an agent with the capacity of accurate understanding and proper responding for emotions. Existing models for empathetic dialogue generation focus on the emotion flow in one direction, that is, from the cont
ext to response. We argue that conducting an empathetic conversation is a bidirectional process, where empathy occurs when the emotions of two interlocutors could converge on the same point, i.e., reaching an emotional consensus. Besides, we also find that the empathetic dialogue corpus is extremely limited, which further restricts the model performance. To address the above issues, we propose a dual-generative model, Dual-Emp, to simultaneously construct the emotional consensus and utilize some external unpaired data. Specifically, our model integrates a forward dialogue model, a backward dialogue model, and a discrete latent variable representing the emotional consensus into a unified architecture. Then, to alleviate the constraint of paired data, we extract unpaired emotional data from open-domain conversations and employ Dual-Emp to produce pseudo paired empathetic samples, which is more efficient and low-cost than the human annotation. Automatic and human evaluations demonstrate that our method outperforms competitive baselines in producing coherent and empathetic responses.
Transformer-based pre-trained language models boost the performance of open-domain dialogue systems. Prior works leverage Transformer-based pre-trained language models to generate texts with desired attributes in two general approaches: (1) gradient-
based methods: updating all latent representations of pre-trained models with gradients from attribute models; (2) weighted-decoding methods: re-ranking beam candidates from pre-trained models with attribute functions. However, gradient-based methods lead to high computation cost and can easily get overfitted on small training sets, while weighted-decoding methods are inherently constrained by the low-variance high-bias pre-trained model. In this work, we propose a novel approach to control the generation of Transformer-based pre-trained language models: the SideControl framework, which leverages a novel control attributes loss to incorporate useful control signals, and is shown to perform well with very limited training samples. We evaluate our proposed method on two benchmark open-domain dialogue datasets, and results show that the SideControl framework has better controllability, higher generation quality and better sample-efficiency than existing gradient-based and weighted-decoding baselines.
