A Copy-Augmented Sequence-to-Sequence Architecture Gives Good Performance on Task-Oriented Dialogue

Mihail Eric, Christopher Manning


Abstract
Task-oriented dialogue focuses on conversational agents that participate in dialogues with user goals on domain-specific topics. In contrast to chatbots, which simply seek to sustain open-ended meaningful discourse, existing task-oriented agents usually explicitly model user intent and belief states. This paper examines bypassing such an explicit representation by depending on a latent neural embedding of state and learning selective attention to dialogue history together with copying to incorporate relevant prior context. We complement recent work by showing the effectiveness of simple sequence-to-sequence neural architectures with a copy mechanism. Our model outperforms more complex memory-augmented models by 7% in per-response generation and is on par with the current state-of-the-art on DSTC2, a real-world task-oriented dialogue dataset.
Anthology ID:
E17-2075
Volume:
Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 2, Short Papers
Month:
April
Year:
2017
Address:
Valencia, Spain
Editors:
Mirella Lapata, Phil Blunsom, Alexander Koller
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
468–473
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/E17-2075
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mihail Eric and Christopher Manning. 2017. A Copy-Augmented Sequence-to-Sequence Architecture Gives Good Performance on Task-Oriented Dialogue. In Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 2, Short Papers, pages 468–473, Valencia, Spain. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Copy-Augmented Sequence-to-Sequence Architecture Gives Good Performance on Task-Oriented Dialogue (Eric & Manning, EACL 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/E17-2075.pdf