This tutorial provides an in-depth exploration of Knowledge-enhanced Dialogue Systems (KEDS), diving into their foundational aspects, methodologies, advantages, and practical applications. Topics include the distinction between internal and external knowledge integration, diverse methodologies employed in grounding dialogues, and innovative approaches to leveraging knowledge graphs for enhanced conversation quality. Furthermore, the tutorial touches upon the rise of biomedical text mining, the advent of domain-specific language models, and the challenges and strategies specific to medical dialogue generation. The primary objective is to give attendees a comprehensive understanding of KEDS. By delineating the nuances of these systems, the tutorial aims to elucidate their significance, highlight advancements made using deep learning, and pinpoint the current challenges. Special emphasis is placed on showcasing how KEDS can be fine-tuned for domain-specific requirements, with a spotlight on the healthcare sector. The tutorial is crafted for both beginners and intermediate researchers in the dialogue systems domain, with a focus on those keen on advancing research in KEDS. It will also be valuable for practitioners in sectors like healthcare, seeking to integrate advanced dialogue systems.

Grounding dialogue on external knowledge and interpreting linguistic patterns in dialogue history context, such as ellipsis, anaphora, and co-reference is critical for dialogue comprehension and generation. In this paper, we present a novel open-domain dialogue generation model which effectively utilizes the large-scale commonsense and named entity based knowledge in addition to the unstructured topic-specific knowledge associated with each utterance. We enhance the commonsense knowledge with named entity-aware structures using co-references. Our proposed model utilizes a multi-hop attention layer to preserve the most accurate and critical parts of the dialogue history and the associated knowledge. In addition, we employ a Commonsense and Named Entity Enhanced Attention Module, which starts with the extracted triples from various sources and gradually finds the relevant supporting set of triples using multi-hop attention with the query vector obtained from the interactive dialogue-knowledge module. Empirical results on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of both automatic evaluation metrics and human judgment. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/deekshaVarshney/CNTF; https://www.iitp.ac.in/-ai-nlp-ml/resources/codes/CNTF.zip.

A recent topic of research in natural language generation has been the development of automatic response generation modules that can automatically respond to a user’s utterance in an empathetic manner. Previous research has tackled this task using neural generative methods by augmenting emotion classes with the input sequences. However, the outputs by these models may be inconsistent. We employ multi-task learning to predict the emotion label and to generate a viable response for a given utterance using a common encoder with multiple decoders. Our proposed encoder-decoder model consists of a self-attention based encoder and a decoder with dot product attention mechanism to generate response with a specified emotion. We use the focal loss to handle imbalanced data distribution, and utilize the consistency loss to allow coherent decoding by the decoders. Human evaluation reveals that our model produces more emotionally pertinent responses. In addition, our model outperforms multiple strong baselines on automatic evaluation measures such as F1 and BLEU scores, thus resulting in more fluent and adequate responses.

Automatic extraction of disaster-related events and their arguments from natural language text is vital for building a decision support system for crisis management. Event extraction from various news sources is a well-explored area for this objective. However, extracting events alone, without any context, provides only partial help for this purpose. Extracting related arguments like Time, Place, Casualties, etc., provides a complete picture of the disaster event. In this paper, we create a disaster domain dataset in Hindi by annotating disaster-related event and arguments. We also obtain equivalent datasets for Bengali and English from a collaboration. We build a multi-lingual deep learning model for argument extraction in all the three languages. We also compare our multi-lingual system with a similar baseline mono-lingual system trained for each language separately. It is observed that a single multi-lingual system is able to compensate for lack of training data, by using joint training of dataset from different languages in shared space, thus giving a better overall result.