Addressee and Response Selection for Multi-Party Conversation

Hiroki Ouchi1 and Yuta Tsuboi2
1Nara Institute of Science and Technology, 2IBM Research - Tokyo


Abstract

To create conversational systems working in actual situations, it is crucial to assume that they interact with multiple agents. In this work, we tackle addressee and response selection for multi-party conversation, in which systems are expected to select whom they address as well as what they say. The key challenge of this task is to jointly model who is talking about what in a previous context. For the joint modeling, we propose two modeling frameworks: 1) static modeling and 2) dynamic modeling. To show benchmark results of our frameworks, we created a multi-party conversation corpus. Our experiments on the dataset show that the recurrent neural network based models of our frameworks robustly predict addressees and responses in conversations with a large number of agents.