Topic-Aware Multi-turn Dialogue Modeling

Authors

  • Yi Xu Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University Key Laboratory of Shanghai Education Commission for Intelligent Interaction and Cognitive Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China MoE Key Lab of Artificial Intelligence, AI Institute, Shanghai Jiao Tong University
  • Hai Zhao Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University Key Laboratory of Shanghai Education Commission for Intelligent Interaction and Cognitive Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China MoE Key Lab of Artificial Intelligence, AI Institute, Shanghai Jiao Tong University
  • Zhuosheng Zhang Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University Key Laboratory of Shanghai Education Commission for Intelligent Interaction and Cognitive Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China MoE Key Lab of Artificial Intelligence, AI Institute, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v35i16.17668

Keywords:

Conversational AI/Dialog Systems

Abstract

In the retrieval-based multi-turn dialogue modeling, it remains a challenge to select the most appropriate response according to extracting salient features in context utterances. As a conversation goes on, topic shift at discourse-level naturally happens through the continuous multi-turn dialogue context. However, all known retrieval-based systems are satisfied with exploiting local topic words for context utterance representation but fail to capture such essential global topic-aware clues at discourse-level. Instead of taking topic-agnostic n-gram utterance as processing unit for matching purpose in existing systems, this paper presents a novel topic-aware solution for multi-turn dialogue modeling, which segments and extracts topic-aware utterances in an unsupervised way, so that the resulted model is capable of capturing salient topic shift at discourse-level in need and thus effectively track topic flow during multi-turn conversation. Our topic-aware modeling is implemented by a newly proposed unsupervised topic-aware segmentation algorithm and Topic-Aware Dual-attention Matching (TADAM) Network, which matches each topic segment with the response in a dual cross-attention way. Experimental results on three public datasets show TADAM can outperform the state-of-the-art method, especially by 3.3% on E-commerce dataset that has an obvious topic shift.

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Published

2021-05-18

How to Cite

Xu, Y., Zhao, H., & Zhang, Z. (2021). Topic-Aware Multi-turn Dialogue Modeling. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 35(16), 14176-14184. https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v35i16.17668

Issue

Section

AAAI Technical Track on Speech and Natural Language Processing III