Fine-Grained Sentence Functions for Short-Text Conversation

Wei Bi, Jun Gao, Xiaojiang Liu, Shuming Shi


Abstract
Sentence function is an important linguistic feature referring to a user’s purpose in uttering a specific sentence. The use of sentence function has shown promising results to improve the performance of conversation models. However, there is no large conversation dataset annotated with sentence functions. In this work, we collect a new Short-Text Conversation dataset with manually annotated SEntence FUNctions (STC-Sefun). Classification models are trained on this dataset to (i) recognize the sentence function of new data in a large corpus of short-text conversations; (ii) estimate a proper sentence function of the response given a test query. We later train conversation models conditioned on the sentence functions, including information retrieval-based and neural generative models. Experimental results demonstrate that the use of sentence functions can help improve the quality of the returned responses.
Anthology ID:
P19-1389
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:
3984–3993
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1389
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P19-1389
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Wei Bi, Jun Gao, Xiaojiang Liu, and Shuming Shi. 2019. Fine-Grained Sentence Functions for Short-Text Conversation. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 3984–3993, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Fine-Grained Sentence Functions for Short-Text Conversation (Bi et al., ACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1389.pdf