Modeling Multi-turn Conversation with Deep Utterance Aggregation

Zhuosheng Zhang, Jiangtong Li, Pengfei Zhu, Hai Zhao, Gongshen Liu


Abstract
Multi-turn conversation understanding is a major challenge for building intelligent dialogue systems. This work focuses on retrieval-based response matching for multi-turn conversation whose related work simply concatenates the conversation utterances, ignoring the interactions among previous utterances for context modeling. In this paper, we formulate previous utterances into context using a proposed deep utterance aggregation model to form a fine-grained context representation. In detail, a self-matching attention is first introduced to route the vital information in each utterance. Then the model matches a response with each refined utterance and the final matching score is obtained after attentive turns aggregation. Experimental results show our model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on three multi-turn conversation benchmarks, including a newly introduced e-commerce dialogue corpus.
Anthology ID:
C18-1317
Volume:
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
August
Year:
2018
Address:
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
Editors:
Emily M. Bender, Leon Derczynski, Pierre Isabelle
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3740–3752
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/C18-1317
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhuosheng Zhang, Jiangtong Li, Pengfei Zhu, Hai Zhao, and Gongshen Liu. 2018. Modeling Multi-turn Conversation with Deep Utterance Aggregation. In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 3740–3752, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Modeling Multi-turn Conversation with Deep Utterance Aggregation (Zhang et al., COLING 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/C18-1317.pdf
Code
 cooelf/DeepUtteranceAggregation
Data
E-commerceDoubanDouban Conversation CorpusUDC