A Simple and Efficient Multi-Task Learning Approach for Conditioned Dialogue Generation

Yan Zeng, Jian-Yun Nie


Abstract
Conditioned dialogue generation suffers from the scarcity of labeled responses. In this work, we exploit labeled non-dialogue text data related to the condition, which are much easier to collect. We propose a multi-task learning approach to leverage both labeled dialogue and text data. The 3 tasks jointly optimize the same pre-trained Transformer – conditioned dialogue generation task on the labeled dialogue data, conditioned language encoding task and conditioned language generation task on the labeled text data. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art models by leveraging the labeled texts, and it also obtains larger improvement in performance comparing to the previous methods to leverage text data.
Anthology ID:
2021.naacl-main.392
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Month:
June
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Kristina Toutanova, Anna Rumshisky, Luke Zettlemoyer, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Iz Beltagy, Steven Bethard, Ryan Cotterell, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Yichao Zhou
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4927–4939
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.392
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.392
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yan Zeng and Jian-Yun Nie. 2021. A Simple and Efficient Multi-Task Learning Approach for Conditioned Dialogue Generation. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 4927–4939, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Simple and Efficient Multi-Task Learning Approach for Conditioned Dialogue Generation (Zeng & Nie, NAACL 2021)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.392.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.392.mp4