Retrieval-Generation Alignment for End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialogue System

Weizhou Shen, Yingqi Gao, Canbin Huang, Fanqi Wan, Xiaojun Quan, Wei Bi


Abstract
Developing an efficient retriever to retrieve knowledge from a large-scale knowledge base (KB) is critical for task-oriented dialogue systems to effectively handle localized and specialized tasks. However, widely used generative models such as T5 and ChatGPT often struggle to differentiate subtle differences among the retrieved KB records when generating responses, resulting in suboptimal quality of generated responses. In this paper, we propose the application of maximal marginal likelihood to train a perceptive retriever by utilizing signals from response generation for supervision. In addition, our approach goes beyond considering solely retrieved entities and incorporates various meta knowledge to guide the generator, thus improving the utilization of knowledge. We evaluate our approach on three task-oriented dialogue datasets using T5 and ChatGPT as the backbone models. The results demonstrate that when combined with meta knowledge, the response generator can effectively leverage high-quality knowledge records from the retriever and enhance the quality of generated responses. The code of this work is available at https://github.com/shenwzh3/MK-TOD.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.514
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8261–8275
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.514
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.514
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Weizhou Shen, Yingqi Gao, Canbin Huang, Fanqi Wan, Xiaojun Quan, and Wei Bi. 2023. Retrieval-Generation Alignment for End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialogue System. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 8261–8275, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Retrieval-Generation Alignment for End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialogue System (Shen et al., EMNLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.514.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.514.mp4