Yunzhe Tao


2021

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A Template-guided Hybrid Pointer Network for Knowledge-based Task-oriented Dialogue Systems
Dingmin Wang | Ziyao Chen | Wanwei He | Li Zhong | Yunzhe Tao | Min Yang
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Document-grounded Dialogue and Conversational Question Answering (DialDoc 2021)

Most existing neural network based task-oriented dialog systems follow encoder-decoder paradigm, where the decoder purely depends on the source texts to generate a sequence of words, usually suffering from instability and poor readability. Inspired by the traditional template-based generation approaches, we propose a template-guided hybrid pointer network for knowledge-based task-oriented dialog systems, which retrieves several potentially relevant answers from a pre-constructed domain-specific conversational repository as guidance answers, and incorporates the guidance answers into both the encoding and decoding processes. Specifically, we design a memory pointer network model with a gating mechanism to fully exploit the semantic correlation between the retrieved answers and the ground-truth response. We evaluate our model on four widely used task-oriented datasets, including one simulated and three manually created datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model achieves significantly better performance than the state-of-the-art methods over different automatic evaluation metrics.