Learning End-to-End Goal-Oriented Dialog with Multiple Answers

Janarthanan Rajendran, Jatin Ganhotra, Satinder Singh, Lazaros Polymenakos


Abstract
In a dialog, there could be multiple valid next utterances at any point. The present end-to-end neural methods for dialog do not take this into account. They learn with the assumption that at any time there is only one correct next utterance. In this work, we focus on this problem in the goal-oriented dialog setting where there are different paths to reach a goal. We propose a new method, that uses a combination of supervised learning and reinforcement learning approaches to address this issue. We also propose a new and more effective testbed, permuted-bAbI dialog tasks, by introducing multiple valid next utterances to the original-bAbI dialog tasks, which allows evaluation of end-to-end goal-oriented dialog systems in a more realistic setting. We show that there is a significant drop in performance of existing end-to-end neural methods from 81.5% per-dialog accuracy on original-bAbI dialog tasks to 30.3% on permuted-bAbI dialog tasks. We also show that our proposed method improves the performance and achieves 47.3% per-dialog accuracy on permuted-bAbI dialog tasks. We also release permuted-bAbI dialog tasks, our proposed testbed, to the community for evaluating dialog systems in a goal-oriented setting.
Anthology ID:
D18-1418
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October-November
Year:
2018
Address:
Brussels, Belgium
Editors:
Ellen Riloff, David Chiang, Julia Hockenmaier, Jun’ichi Tsujii
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3834–3843
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D18-1418
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D18-1418
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Janarthanan Rajendran, Jatin Ganhotra, Satinder Singh, and Lazaros Polymenakos. 2018. Learning End-to-End Goal-Oriented Dialog with Multiple Answers. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 3834–3843, Brussels, Belgium. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Learning End-to-End Goal-Oriented Dialog with Multiple Answers (Rajendran et al., EMNLP 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D18-1418.pdf
Code
 IBM/permuted-bAbI-dialog-tasks
Data
Permuted bAbI dialog task