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Register a new userWhy Do Neural Dialog Systems Generate Short and Meaningless Replies? A Comparison between Dialog and Translation
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Lili Mou
Publication date
2017
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
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This paper addresses the question: Why do neural dialog systems generate short and meaningless replies? We conjecture that, in a dialog system, an utterance may have multiple equally plausible replies, causing the deficiency of neural networks in the dialog application. We propose a systematic way to mimic the dialog scenario in a machine translation system, and manage to reproduce the phenomenon of generating short and less meaningful sentences in the translation setting, showing evidence of our conjecture.
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Recent advances in sequence-to-sequence learning reveal a purely data-driven approach to the response generation task. Despite its diverse applications, existing neural models are prone to producing short and generic replies, making it infeasible to tackle open-domain challenges. In this research, we analyze this critical issue in light of the models optimization goal and the specific characteristics of the human-to-human dialog corpus. By decomposing the black box into parts, a detailed analysis of the probability limit was conducted to reveal the reason behind these universal replies. Based on these analyses, we propose a max-margin ranking regularization term to avoid the models leaning to these replies. Finally, empirical experiments on case studies and benchmarks with several metrics validate this approach.
Neural generative models have been become increasingly popular when building conversational agents. They offer flexibility, can be easily adapted to new domains, and require minimal domain engineering. A common criticism of these systems is that they seldom understand or use the available dialog history effectively. In this paper, we take an empirical approach to understanding how these models use the available dialog history by studying the sensitivity of the models to artificially introduced unnatural changes or perturbations to their context at test time. We experiment with 10 different types of perturbations on 4 multi-turn dialog datasets and find that commonly used neural dialog architectures like recurrent and transformer-based seq2seq models are rarely sensitive to most perturbations such as missing or reordering utterances, shuffling words, etc. Also, by open-sourcing our code, we believe that it will serve as a useful diagnostic tool for evaluating dialog systems in the future.
We introduce a new task of rephrasing for a more natural virtual assistant. Currently, virtual assistants work in the paradigm of intent slot tagging and the slot values are directly passed as-is to the execution engine. However, this setup fails in some scenarios such as messaging when the query given by the user needs to be changed before repeating it or sending it to another user. For example, for queries like ask my wife if she can pick up the kids or remind me to take my pills, we need to rephrase the content to can you pick up the kids and take your pills In this paper, we study the problem of rephrasing with messaging as a use case and release a dataset of 3000 pairs of original query and rephrased query. We show that BART, a pre-trained transformers-based masked language model with auto-regressive decoding, is a strong baseline for the task, and show improvements by adding a copy-pointer and copy loss to it. We analyze different tradeoffs of BART-based and LSTM-based seq2seq models, and propose a distilled LSTM-based seq2seq as the best practical model.
Recent works have shown that generative data augmentation, where synthetic samples generated from deep generative models complement the training dataset, benefit NLP tasks. In this work, we extend this approach to the task of dialog state tracking for goal-oriented dialogs. Due to the inherent hierarchical structure of goal-oriented dialogs over utterances and related annotations, the deep generative model must be capable of capturing the coherence among different hierarchies and types of dialog features. We propose the Variational Hierarchical Dialog Autoencoder (VHDA) for modeling the complete aspects of goal-oriented dialogs, including linguistic features and underlying structured annotations, namely speaker information, dialog acts, and goals. The proposed architecture is designed to model each aspect of goal-oriented dialogs using inter-connected latent variables and learns to generate coherent goal-oriented dialogs from the latent spaces. To overcome training issues that arise from training complex variational models, we propose appropriate training strategies. Experiments on various dialog datasets show that our model improves the downstream dialog trackers robustness via generative data augmentation. We also discover additional benefits of our unified approach to modeling goal-oriented dialogs: dialog response generation and user simulation, where our model outperforms previous strong baselines.
Conversational agents are exploding in popularity. However, much work remains in the area of non goal-oriented conversations, despite significant growth in research interest over recent years. To advance the state of the art in conversational AI, Amazon launched the Alexa Prize, a 2.5-million dollar university competition where sixteen selected university teams built conversational agents to deliver the best social conversational experience. Alexa Prize provided the academic community with the unique opportunity to perform research with a live system used by millions of users. The subjectivity associated with evaluating conversations is key element underlying the challenge of building non-goal oriented dialogue systems. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive evaluation strategy with multiple metrics designed to reduce subjectivity by selecting metrics which correlate well with human judgement. The proposed metrics provide granular analysis of the conversational agents, which is not captured in human ratings. We show that these metrics can be used as a reasonable proxy for human judgment. We provide a mechanism to unify the metrics for selecting the top performing agents, which has also been applied throughout the Alexa Prize competition. To our knowledge, to date it is the largest setting for evaluating agents with millions of conversations and hundreds of thousands of ratings from users. We believe that this work is a step towards an automatic evaluation process for conversational AIs.
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