English

Fact-based Dialogue Generation with Convergent and Divergent Decoding

Computation and Language 2020-05-11 v2 Human-Computer Interaction Machine Learning

Abstract

Fact-based dialogue generation is a task of generating a human-like response based on both dialogue context and factual texts. Various methods were proposed to focus on generating informative words that contain facts effectively. However, previous works implicitly assume a topic to be kept on a dialogue and usually converse passively, therefore the systems have a difficulty to generate diverse responses that provide meaningful information proactively. This paper proposes an end-to-end fact-based dialogue system augmented with the ability of convergent and divergent thinking over both context and facts, which can converse about the current topic or introduce a new topic. Specifically, our model incorporates a novel convergent and divergent decoding that can generate informative and diverse responses considering not only given inputs (context and facts) but also inputs-related topics. Both automatic and human evaluation results on DSTC7 dataset show that our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, indicating that our model can generate more appropriate, informative, and diverse responses.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2005.03174,
  title  = {Fact-based Dialogue Generation with Convergent and Divergent Decoding},
  author = {Ryota Tanaka and Akinobu Lee},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2005.03174},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

8 pages, 3 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-23T15:22:11.158Z