End-to-End Autoregressive Retrieval via Bootstrapping for Smart Reply Systems

Benjamin Towle, Ke Zhou


Abstract
Reply suggestion systems represent a staple component of many instant messaging and email systems. However, the requirement to produce sets of replies, rather than individual replies, makes the task poorly suited for out-of-the-box retrieval architectures, which only consider individual message-reply similarity. As a result, these system often rely on additional post-processing modules to diversify the outputs. However, these approaches are ultimately bottlenecked by the performance of the initial retriever, which in practice struggles to present a sufficiently diverse range of options to the downstream diversification module, leading to the suggestions being less relevant to the user. In this paper, we consider a novel approach that radically simplifies this pipeline through an autoregressive text-to-text retrieval model, that learns the smart reply task end-to-end from a dataset of (message, reply set) pairs obtained via bootstrapping. Empirical results show this method consistently outperforms a range of state-of-the-art baselines across three datasets, corresponding to a 5.1%-17.9% improvement in relevance, and a 0.5%-63.1% improvement in diversity compared to the best baseline approach. We make our code publicly available.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.510
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7610–7622
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.510
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.510
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Benjamin Towle and Ke Zhou. 2023. End-to-End Autoregressive Retrieval via Bootstrapping for Smart Reply Systems. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 7610–7622, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
End-to-End Autoregressive Retrieval via Bootstrapping for Smart Reply Systems (Towle & Zhou, Findings 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.510.pdf