Abstract
Dialog systems have achieved significant progress and have been widely used in various scenarios. The previous researches mainly focused on designing dialog generation models in a single scenario, while comprehensive abilities are required to handle tasks under various scenarios in the real world. In this paper, we propose a general Multi-Skill Dialog Framework, namely MSDF, which can be applied in different dialog tasks (e.g. knowledge grounded dialog and persona based dialog). Specifically, we propose a transferable response generator pre-trained on diverse large-scale dialog corpora as the backbone of MSDF, consisting of BERT-based encoders and a GPT-based decoder. To select the response consistent with dialog history, we propose a consistency selector trained through negative sampling. Moreover, the flexible copy mechanism of external knowledge is also employed to enhance the utilization of multiform knowledge in various scenarios. We conduct experiments on knowledge grounded dialog, recommendation dialog, and persona based dialog tasks. The experimental results indicate that our MSDF outperforms the baseline models with a large margin. In the Multi-skill Dialog of 2021 Language and Intelligence Challenge, our general MSDF won the 3rd prize, which proves our MSDF is effective and competitive.
Y. Zhao and X. Hu—Contribute equally to this work.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Bao, S., et al.: Plato-2: towards building an open-domain chatbot via curriculum learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.16779 (2020)
Cai, D., Wang, Y., Bi, W., Tu, Z., Liu, X., Shi, S.: Retrieval-guided dialogue response generation via a matching-to-generation framework. 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), pp. 1866–1875 (2019)
Cao, Y., Bi, W., Fang, M., Tao, D.: Pretrained language models for dialogue generation with multiple input sources. In: Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Findings, pp. 909–917 (2020)
Chen, Q., et al.: Towards knowledge-based recommender dialog system. 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), pp. 1803–1813 (2019)
Devlin, J., Chang, M.W., Lee, K., Toutanova, K.: Bert: pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding. In: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), pp. 4171–4186 (2019)
Kim, B., Ahn, J., Kim, G.: Sequential latent knowledge selection for knowledge-grounded dialogue. In: International Conference on Learning Representations (2019)
Lewis, M., et al.: Bart: Denoising sequence-to-sequence pre-training for natural language generation, translation, and comprehension. In: Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 7871–7880 (2020)
Lian, R., Xie, M., Wang, F., Peng, J., Wu, H.: Learning to select knowledge for response generation in dialog systems. In: IJCAI International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, p. 5081 (2019)
Liu, Q., et al.: You impress me: dialogue generation via mutual persona perception. In: Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 1417–1427 (2020)
Liu, Y., et al.: Roberta: a robustly optimized bert pretraining approach. arXiv preprint arXiv:1907.11692 (2019)
Liu, Z., Wang, H., Niu, Z.Y., Wu, H., Che, W., Liu, T.: Towards conversational recommendation over multi-type dialogs. In: Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 1036–1049 (2020)
Moon, S., Shah, P., Kumar, A., Subba, R.: Opendialkg: explainable conversational reasoning with attention-based walks over knowledge graphs. In: Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 845–854 (2019)
Ni, J., Young, T., Pandelea, V., Xue, F., Adiga, V., Cambria, E.: Recent advances in deep learning-based dialogue systems. arXiv preprint arXiv:2105.04387 (2021)
Radford, A., Wu, J., Child, R., Luan, D., Amodei, D., Sutskever, I.: Language models are unsupervised multitask learners. OpenAI blog 1(8), 9 (2019)
See, A., Liu, P.J., Manning, C.D.: Get to the point: summarization with pointer-generator networks. In: Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pp. 1073–1083 (2017)
Serban, I.V., Sordoni, A., Bengio, Y., Courville, A., Pineau, J.: Building end-to-end dialogue systems using generative hierarchical neural network models. In: Thirtieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (2016)
Shang, L., Lu, Z., Li, H.: Neural responding machine for short-text conversation. In: Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 7th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pp. 1577–1586 (2015)
Sutskever, I., Vinyals, O., Le, Q.V.: Sequence to sequence learning with neural networks. Adv. Neural. Inf. Process. Syst. 27, 3104–3112 (2014)
Wang, Y., Ke, P., Zheng, Y., Huang, K., Jiang, Y., Zhu, X., Huang, M.: A large-scale Chinese short-text conversation dataset. In: CCF International Conference on Natural Language Processing and Chinese Computing, pp. 91–103. Springer (2020)
Wu, W., Guo, Z., Zhou, X., Wu, H., Zhang, X., Lian, R., Wang, H.: Proactive human-machine conversation with explicit conversation goal. In: Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 3794–3804 (2019)
Wu, Y., Wu, W., Xing, C., Zhou, M., Li, Z.: Sequential matching network: a new architecture for multi-turn response selection in retrieval-based chatbots. In: Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pp. 496–505 (2017)
Xu, M., et al.: A neural topical expansion framework for unstructured persona-oriented dialogue generation. arXiv preprint arXiv:2002.02153 (2020)
Zeng, G., et al.: Meddialog: a large-scale medical dialogue dataset. In: Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pp. 9241–9250 (2020)
Zhang, Y., et al.: Dialogpt: large-scale generative pre-training for conversational response generation. In: Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations, pp. 270–278 (2020)
Zhou, H., Huang, M., Zhang, T., Zhu, X., Liu, B.: Emotional chatting machine: Emotional conversation generation with internal and external memory. In: Thirty-Second AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (2018)
Zhou, H., Zheng, C., Huang, K., Huang, M., Zhu, X.: Kdconv: A chinese multi-domain dialogue dataset towards multi-turn knowledge-driven conversation. In: Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. pp. 7098–7108 (2020)
Zhou, K., Zhao, W.X., Bian, S., Zhou, Y., Wen, J.R., Yu, J.: Improving conversational recommender systems via knowledge graph based semantic fusion. In: Proceedings of the 26th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining. pp. 1006–1014 (2020)
Zhou, K., Zhou, Y., Zhao, W.X., Wang, X., Wen, J.R.: Towards topic-guided conversational recommender system. In: Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics. pp. 4128–4139 (2020)
Acknowledgement
We appreciate the beneficial and insightful feedback from the anonymous reviewers and Baidu Inc. This work is jointly supported by grants: Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 62006061 and 61872113), Strategic Emerging Industry Development Special Funds of Shenzhen (JCYJ20200109113403826 and JCYJ20200109113441941) and Stable Support Program for Higher Education Institutions of Shenzhen (No. GXWD20201230155427003-20200824155011001).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Zhao, Y. et al. (2021). MSDF: A General Open-Domain Multi-skill Dialog Framework. In: Wang, L., Feng, Y., Hong, Y., He, R. (eds) Natural Language Processing and Chinese Computing. NLPCC 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13029. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88483-3_29
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88483-3_29
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-88482-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-88483-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)