Neural response generation for task completion using conversational knowledge graph

PLoS One. 2023 Feb 9;18(2):e0269856. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0269856. eCollection 2023.

Abstract

Effective dialogue generation for task completion is challenging to build. The task requires the response generation system to generate the responses consistent with intent and slot values, have diversity in response and be able to handle multiple domains. The response also needs to be context relevant with respect to the previous utterances in the conversation. In this paper, we build six different models containing Bi-directional Long Short Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) based encoders. To effectively generate the correct slot values, we implement a copy mechanism at the decoder side. To capture the conversation context and the current state of the conversation we introduce a simple heuristic to build a conversational knowledge graph. Using this novel algorithm we are able to capture important aspects in a conversation. This conversational knowledge-graph is then used by our response generation model to generate more relevant and consistent responses. Using this knowledge-graph we do not need the entire utterance history, rather only the last utterance to capture the conversational context. We conduct experiments showing the effectiveness of the knowledge-graph in capturing the context and generating good response. We compare these results against hierarchical-encoder-decoder models and show that the use of triples from the conversational knowledge-graph is an effective method to capture context and the user requirement. Using this knowledge-graph we show an average performance gain of 0.75 BLEU score across different models. Similar results also hold true across different manual evaluation metrics.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Benchmarking
  • Communication*
  • Electric Power Supplies
  • Pattern Recognition, Automated*

Grants and funding

This work was funded by the Accenture Technology Labs Bangalore (https://www.accenture.com/in-en), grant number 458 to Indian Institute of Technology Patna and Young Faculty Research Fellowship Award (YFRF) awarded to Dr. Asif Ekbal. SS received support via salary from Accenture. The specific roles of these authors are articulated in the ‘author contributions’ section. Funders had no role or influence on the design and conduct of the research, including software development, and were not involved in data analysis, conclusions drawn from the data, and drafting or editing the manuscript.