Unsupervised Context Rewriting for Open Domain Conversation

Kun Zhou, Kai Zhang, Yu Wu, Shujie Liu, Jingsong Yu


Abstract
Context modeling has a pivotal role in open domain conversation. Existing works either use heuristic methods or jointly learn context modeling and response generation with an encoder-decoder framework. This paper proposes an explicit context rewriting method, which rewrites the last utterance by considering context history. We leverage pseudo-parallel data and elaborate a context rewriting network, which is built upon the CopyNet with the reinforcement learning method. The rewritten utterance is beneficial to candidate retrieval, explainable context modeling, as well as enabling to employ a single-turn framework to the multi-turn scenario. The empirical results show that our model outperforms baselines in terms of the rewriting quality, the multi-turn response generation, and the end-to-end retrieval-based chatbots.
Anthology ID:
D19-1192
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, Xiaojun Wan
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1834–1844
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1192
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1192
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kun Zhou, Kai Zhang, Yu Wu, Shujie Liu, and Jingsong Yu. 2019. Unsupervised Context Rewriting for Open Domain Conversation. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 1834–1844, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Unsupervised Context Rewriting for Open Domain Conversation (Zhou et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1192.pdf
Attachment:
 D19-1192.Attachment.zip
Data
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