Combining Open Domain Question Answering with a Task-Oriented Dialog System

Jan Nehring, Nils Feldhus, Harleen Kaur, Akhyar Ahmed


Abstract
We apply the modular dialog system framework to combine open-domain question answering with a task-oriented dialog system. This meta dialog system can answer questions from Wikipedia and at the same time act as a personal assistant. The aim of this system is to combine the strength of an open-domain question answering system with the conversational power of task-oriented dialog systems. After explaining the technical details of the system, we combined a new dataset out of standard datasets to evaluate the system. We further introduce an evaluation method for this system. Using this method, we compare the performance of the non-modular system with the performance of the modular system and show that the modular dialog system framework is very suitable for this combination of conversational agents and that the performance of each agent decreases only marginally through the modular setting.
Anthology ID:
2021.dialdoc-1.5
Volume:
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Document-grounded Dialogue and Conversational Question Answering (DialDoc 2021)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Song Feng, Siva Reddy, Malihe Alikhani, He He, Yangfeng Ji, Mohit Iyyer, Zhou Yu
Venue:
dialdoc
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
38–45
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.dialdoc-1.5
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.dialdoc-1.5
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jan Nehring, Nils Feldhus, Harleen Kaur, and Akhyar Ahmed. 2021. Combining Open Domain Question Answering with a Task-Oriented Dialog System. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Document-grounded Dialogue and Conversational Question Answering (DialDoc 2021), pages 38–45, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Combining Open Domain Question Answering with a Task-Oriented Dialog System (Nehring et al., dialdoc 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.dialdoc-1.5.pdf
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