Constrained Decoding for Neural NLG from Compositional Representations in Task-Oriented Dialogue

Anusha Balakrishnan, Jinfeng Rao, Kartikeya Upasani, Michael White, Rajen Subba


Abstract
Generating fluent natural language responses from structured semantic representations is a critical step in task-oriented conversational systems. Avenues like the E2E NLG Challenge have encouraged the development of neural approaches, particularly sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) models for this problem. The semantic representations used, however, are often underspecified, which places a higher burden on the generation model for sentence planning, and also limits the extent to which generated responses can be controlled in a live system. In this paper, we (1) propose using tree-structured semantic representations, like those used in traditional rule-based NLG systems, for better discourse-level structuring and sentence-level planning; (2) introduce a challenging dataset using this representation for the weather domain; (3) introduce a constrained decoding approach for Seq2Seq models that leverages this representation to improve semantic correctness; and (4) demonstrate promising results on our dataset and the E2E dataset.
Anthology ID:
P19-1080
Volume:
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Editors:
Anna Korhonen, David Traum, Lluís Màrquez
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
831–844
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1080
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P19-1080
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Anusha Balakrishnan, Jinfeng Rao, Kartikeya Upasani, Michael White, and Rajen Subba. 2019. Constrained Decoding for Neural NLG from Compositional Representations in Task-Oriented Dialogue. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 831–844, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Constrained Decoding for Neural NLG from Compositional Representations in Task-Oriented Dialogue (Balakrishnan et al., ACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1080.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/P19-1080.mp4
Code
 facebookresearch/TreeNLG