@inproceedings{vougiouklis-etal-2016-neural,
    title = "A Neural Network Approach for Knowledge-Driven Response Generation",
    author = "Vougiouklis, Pavlos  and
      Hare, Jonathon  and
      Simperl, Elena",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of {COLING} 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers",
    month = dec,
    year = "2016",
    address = "Osaka, Japan",
    publisher = "The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/C16-1318",
    pages = "3370--3380",
    abstract = "We present a novel response generation system. The system assumes the hypothesis that participants in a conversation base their response not only on previous dialog utterances but also on their background knowledge. Our model is based on a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) that is trained over concatenated sequences of comments, a Convolution Neural Network that is trained over Wikipedia sentences and a formulation that couples the two trained embeddings in a multimodal space. We create a dataset of aligned Wikipedia sentences and sequences of Reddit utterances, which we we use to train our model. Given a sequence of past utterances and a set of sentences that represent the background knowledge, our end-to-end learnable model is able to generate context-sensitive and knowledge-driven responses by leveraging the alignment of two different data sources. Our approach achieves up to 55{\%} improvement in perplexity compared to purely sequential models based on RNNs that are trained only on sequences of utterances.",
}