Learning to Plan and Realize Separately for Open-Ended Dialogue Systems

Sashank Santhanam, Zhuo Cheng, Brodie Mather, Bonnie Dorr, Archna Bhatia, Bryanna Hebenstreit, Alan Zemel, Adam Dalton, Tomek Strzalkowski, Samira Shaikh


Abstract
Achieving true human-like ability to conduct a conversation remains an elusive goal for open-ended dialogue systems. We posit this is because extant approaches towards natural language generation (NLG) are typically construed as end-to-end architectures that do not adequately model human generation processes. To investigate, we decouple generation into two separate phases: planning and realization. In the planning phase, we train two planners to generate plans for response utterances. The realization phase uses response plans to produce an appropriate response. Through rigorous evaluations, both automated and human, we demonstrate that decoupling the process into planning and realization performs better than an end-to-end approach.
Anthology ID:
2020.findings-emnlp.247
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2736–2750
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.findings-emnlp.247
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.findings-emnlp.247
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sashank Santhanam, Zhuo Cheng, Brodie Mather, Bonnie Dorr, Archna Bhatia, Bryanna Hebenstreit, Alan Zemel, Adam Dalton, Tomek Strzalkowski, and Samira Shaikh. 2020. Learning to Plan and Realize Separately for Open-Ended Dialogue Systems. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020, pages 2736–2750, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Learning to Plan and Realize Separately for Open-Ended Dialogue Systems (Santhanam et al., Findings 2020)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.findings-emnlp.247.pdf
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 2020.findings-emnlp.247.OptionalSupplementaryMaterial.txt