English

Generative Conversational Networks

Computation and Language 2021-07-20 v2 Human-Computer Interaction

Abstract

Inspired by recent work in meta-learning and generative teaching networks, we propose a framework called Generative Conversational Networks, in which conversational agents learn to generate their own labelled training data (given some seed data) and then train themselves from that data to perform a given task. We use reinforcement learning to optimize the data generation process where the reward signal is the agent's performance on the task. The task can be any language-related task, from intent detection to full task-oriented conversations. In this work, we show that our approach is able to generalise from seed data and performs well in limited data and limited computation settings, with significant gains for intent detection and slot tagging across multiple datasets: ATIS, TOD, SNIPS, and Restaurants8k. We show an average improvement of 35% in intent detection and 21% in slot tagging over a baseline model trained from the seed data. We also conduct an analysis of the novelty of the generated data and provide generated examples for intent detection, slot tagging, and non-goal oriented conversations.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2106.08484,
  title  = {Generative Conversational Networks},
  author = {Alexandros Papangelis and Karthik Gopalakrishnan and Aishwarya Padmakumar and Seokhwan Kim and Gokhan Tur and Dilek Hakkani-Tur},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2106.08484},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

SIGDial 2021

R2 v1 2026-06-24T03:14:45.773Z