We introduce a data set called DCH-2, which contains 4,390 real customer-helpdesk dialogues in Chinese and their English translations. DCH-2 also contains dialogue-level annotations and turn-level annotations obtained independently from either 19 or 20 annotators. The data set was built through our effort as organisers of the NTCIR-14 Short Text Conversation and NTCIR-15 Dialogue Evaluation tasks, to help researchers understand what constitutes an effective customer-helpdesk dialogue, and thereby build efficient and helpful helpdesk systems that are available to customers at all times. In addition, DCH-2 may be utilised for other purposes, for example, as a repository for retrieval-based dialogue systems, or as a parallel corpus for machine translation in the helpdesk domain.
Many neural network models nowadays have achieved promising performances in Chit-chat settings. The majority of them rely on an encoder for understanding the post and a decoder for generating the response. Without given assigned semantics, the models lack the fine-grained control over responses as the semantic mapping between posts and responses is hidden on the fly within the end-to-end manners. Some previous works utilize sampled latent words as a controllable semantic form to drive the generated response around the work, but few works attempt to use more complex semantic patterns to guide the generation. In this paper, we propose to use more detailed semantic forms, including latent responses and part-of-speech sequences sampled from the corresponding distributions, as the controllable semantics to guide the generation. Our results show that the richer semantics are not only able to provide informative and diverse responses, but also increase the overall performance of response quality, including fluency and coherence.
The advancements of neural dialogue generation models show promising results on modeling short-text conversations. However, training such models usually needs a large-scale high-quality dialogue corpus, which is hard to access. In this paper, we present a large-scale cleaned Chinese conversation dataset, LCCC, which contains a base version (6.8million dialogues) and a large version (12.0 million dialogues). The quality of our dataset is ensured by a rigorous data cleaning pipeline, which is built based on a set of rules and a classifier that is trained on manually annotated 110K dialogue pairs. We also release pre-training dialogue models which are trained on LCCC-base and LCCC-large respectively. The cleaned dataset and the pre-training models will facilitate the research of short-text conversation modeling. All the models and datasets are available at https://github.com/thu-coai/CDial-GPT.
Generating qualitative responses has always been a challenge for human-computer dialogue systems. Existing dialogue systems generally derive from either retrieval-based or generative-based approaches, both of which have their own pros and cons. Despite the natural idea of an ensemble model of the two, existing ensemble methods only focused on leveraging one approach to enhance another, we argue however that they can be further mutually enhanced with a proper training strategy. In this paper, we propose ensembleGAN, an adversarial learning framework for enhancing a retrieval-generation ensemble model in open-domain conversation scenario. It consists of a language-model-like generator, a ranker generator, and one ranker discriminator. Aiming at generating responses that approximate the ground-truth and receive high ranking scores from the discriminator, the two generators learn to generate improved highly relevant responses and competitive unobserved candidates respectively, while the discriminative ranker is trained to identify true responses from adversarial ones, thus featuring the merits of both generator counterparts. The experimental results on a large short-text conversation data demonstrate the effectiveness of the ensembleGAN by the amelioration on both human and automatic evaluation metrics.
Despite the effectiveness of sequence-to-sequence framework on the task of Short-Text Conversation (STC), the issue of under-exploitation of training data (i.e., the supervision signals from query text is \textit{ignored}) still remains unresolved. Also, the adopted \textit{maximization}-based decoding strategies, inclined to generating the generic responses or responses with repetition, are unsuited to the STC task. In this paper, we propose to formulate the STC task as a language modeling problem and tailor-make a training strategy to adapt a language model for response generation. To enhance generation performance, we design a relevance-promoting transformer language model, which performs additional supervised source attention after the self-attention to increase the importance of informative query tokens in calculating the token-level representation. The model further refines the query representation with relevance clues inferred from its multiple references during training. In testing, we adopt a \textit{randomization-over-maximization} strategy to reduce the generation of generic responses. Experimental results on a large Chinese STC dataset demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model on relevance metrics and diversity metrics.\footnote{Code available at https://ai.tencent.com/ailab/nlp/dialogue/.
Neural conversation models such as encoder-decoder models are easy to generate bland and generic responses. Some researchers propose to use the conditional variational autoencoder(CVAE) which maximizes the lower bound on the conditional log-likelihood on a continuous latent variable. With different sampled la-tent variables, the model is expected to generate diverse responses. Although the CVAE-based models have shown tremendous potential, their improvement of generating high-quality responses is still unsatisfactory. In this paper, we introduce a discrete latent variable with an explicit semantic meaning to improve the CVAE on short-text conversation. A major advantage of our model is that we can exploit the semantic distance between the latent variables to maintain good diversity between the sampled latent variables. Accordingly, we pro-pose a two-stage sampling approach to enable efficient diverse variable selection from a large latent space assumed in the short-text conversation task. Experimental results indicate that our model outperforms various kinds of generation models under both automatic and human evaluations and generates more diverse and in-formative responses.
Sentence function is an important linguistic feature referring to a user's purpose in uttering a specific sentence. The use of sentence function has shown promising results to improve the performance of conversation models. However, there is no large conversation dataset annotated with sentence functions. In this work, we collect a new Short-Text Conversation dataset with manually annotated SEntence FUNctions (STC-Sefun). Classification models are trained on this dataset to (i) recognize the sentence function of new data in a large corpus of short-text conversations; (ii) estimate a proper sentence function of the response given a test query. We later train conversation models conditioned on the sentence functions, including information retrieval-based and neural generative models. Experimental results demonstrate that the use of sentence functions can help improve the quality of the returned responses.
With the development of Natural Language Processing, Automatic question-answering system such as Waston, Siri, Alexa, has become one of the most important NLP applications. Nowadays, enterprises try to build automatic custom service chatbots to save human resources and provide a 24-hour customer service. Evaluation of chatbots currently relied greatly on human annotation which cost a plenty of time. Thus, has initiated a new Short Text Conversation subtask called Dialogue Quality (DQ) and Nugget Detection (ND) which aim to automatically evaluate dialogues generated by chatbots. In this paper, we solve the DQ and ND subtasks by deep neural network. We proposed two models for both DQ and ND subtasks which is constructed by hierarchical structure: embedding layer, utterance layer, context layer and memory layer, to hierarchical learn dialogue representation from word level, sentence level, context level to long range context level. Furthermore, we apply gating and attention mechanism at utterance layer and context layer to improve the performance. We also tried BERT to replace embedding layer and utterance layer as sentence representation. The result shows that BERT produced a better utterance representation than multi-stack CNN for both DQ and ND subtasks and outperform other models proposed by other researches. The evaluation measures are proposed by , that is, NMD, RSNOD for DQ and JSD, RNSS for ND, which is not traditional evaluation measures such as accuracy, precision, recall and f1-score. Thus, we have done a series of experiments by using traditional evaluation measures and analyze the performance and error.
Neural generative models have become popular and achieved promising performance on short-text conversation tasks. They are generally trained to build a 1-to-1 mapping from the input post to its output response. However, a given post is often associated with multiple replies simultaneously in real applications. Previous research on this task mainly focuses on improving the relevance and informativeness of the top one generated response for each post. Very few works study generating multiple accurate and diverse responses for the same post. In this paper, we propose a novel response generation model, which considers a set of responses jointly and generates multiple diverse responses simultaneously. A reinforcement learning algorithm is designed to solve our model. Experiments on two short-text conversation tasks validate that the multiple responses generated by our model obtain higher quality and larger diversity compared with various state-of-the-art generative models.
Human computer conversation is regarded as one of the most difficult problems in artificial intelligence. In this paper, we address one of its key sub-problems, referred to as short text conversation, in which given a message from human, the computer returns a reasonable response to the message. We leverage the vast amount of short conversation data available on social media to study the issue. We propose formalizing short text conversation as a search problem at the first step, and employing state-of-the-art information retrieval (IR) techniques to carry out the task. We investigate the significance as well as the limitation of the IR approach. Our experiments demonstrate that the retrieval-based model can make the system behave rather "intelligently", when combined with a huge repository of conversation data from social media.
We propose Neural Responding Machine (NRM), a neural network-based response generator for Short-Text Conversation. NRM takes the general encoder-decoder framework: it formalizes the generation of response as a decoding process based on the latent representation of the input text, while both encoding and decoding are realized with recurrent neural networks (RNN). The NRM is trained with a large amount of one-round conversation data collected from a microblogging service. Empirical study shows that NRM can generate grammatically correct and content-wise appropriate responses to over 75% of the input text, outperforming state-of-the-arts in the same setting, including retrieval-based and SMT-based models.
We propose Sentence Level Recurrent Topic Model (SLRTM), a new topic model that assumes the generation of each word within a sentence to depend on both the topic of the sentence and the whole history of its preceding words in the sentence. Different from conventional topic models that largely ignore the sequential order of words or their topic coherence, SLRTM gives full characterization to them by using a Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) based framework. Experimental results have shown that SLRTM outperforms several strong baselines on various tasks. Furthermore, SLRTM can automatically generate sentences given a topic (i.e., topics to sentences), which is a key technology for real world applications such as personalized short text conversation.
The sequence to sequence architecture is widely used in the response generation and neural machine translation to model the potential relationship between two sentences. It typically consists of two parts: an encoder that reads from the source sentence and a decoder that generates the target sentence word by word according to the encoder's output and the last generated word. However, it faces to the cold start problem when generating the first word as there is no previous word to refer. Existing work mainly use a special start symbol </s>to generate the first word. An obvious drawback of these work is that there is not a learnable relationship between words and the start symbol. Furthermore, it may lead to the error accumulation for decoding when the first word is incorrectly generated. In this paper, we proposed a novel approach to learning to generate the first word in the sequence to sequence architecture rather than using the start symbol. Experimental results on the task of response generation of short text conversation show that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art approach in both of the automatic and manual evaluations.
Using neural networks to generate replies in human-computer dialogue systems is attracting increasing attention over the past few years. However, the performance is not satisfactory: the neural network tends to generate safe, universally relevant replies which carry little meaning. In this paper, we propose a content-introducing approach to neural network-based generative dialogue systems. We first use pointwise mutual information (PMI) to predict a noun as a keyword, reflecting the main gist of the reply. We then propose seq2BF, a "sequence to backward and forward sequences" model, which generates a reply containing the given keyword. Experimental results show that our approach significantly outperforms traditional sequence-to-sequence models in terms of human evaluation and the entropy measure, and that the predicted keyword can appear at an appropriate position in the reply.