Unstructured Knowledge Access in Task-oriented Dialog Modeling using Language Inference, Knowledge Retrieval and Knowledge-Integrative Response Generation

Authors^*: Mudit Chaudhary, Borislav Dzodzo, Sida Huang, Chun Hei Lo, Mingzhi Lyu, Lun Yiu Nie, Jinbo Xing, Tianhua Zhang, Xiaoying Zhang, Jingyan Zhou, Hong Cheng, Wai Lam, Helen Meng

Intro

Dialog systems enriched with external knowledge can handle user queries that are outside the scope of the supporting databases/APIs. In this paper, we follow the baseline provided in DSTC9 Track 1 and propose three subsystems, KDEAK, KnowleDgEFactor, and Ens-GPT, which form the pipeline for a task-oriented dialog system capable of accessing unstructured knowledge. Specifically, KDEAK performs knowledge-seeking turn detection by formulating the problem as natural language inference using knowledge from dialogs, databases and FAQs. KnowleDgEFactor accomplishes the knowledge selection task by formulating a factorized knowledge/document retrieval problem with three modules performing domain, entity and knowledge level analyses. Ens-GPT generates a response by first processing multiple knowledge snippets, followed by an ensemble algorithm that decides if the response should be solely derived from a GPT2-XL model, or regenerated in combination with the top-ranking knowledge snippet. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed pipeline system outperforms the baseline and generates high-quality responses, achieving at least 58.77% improvement on BLEU-4 score.

Note:

The repository is currently in process of code refactoring to make it more accessible. The code will be continually updated and the final refined code will be added soon.
If you have any issues, please create an issue in the github and we will try to resolve it as soon as possible.

*_{Equal Contribution}