Deep Active Learning for Dialogue Generation

We propose an online, end-to-end, neural generative conversational model for open-domain dialogue. It is trained using a unique combination of offline two-phase supervised learning and online human-in-the-loop active learning. While most existing research proposes offline supervision or hand-crafted reward functions for online reinforcement, we devise a novel interactive learning mechanism based on hamming-diverse beam search for response generation and one-character user-feedback at each step. Experiments show that our model inherently promotes the generation of semantically relevant and interesting responses, and can be used to train agents with customized personas, moods and conversational styles.Comment: Accepted at 6th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM) 2017 (Previously titled "Online Sequence-to-Sequence Active Learning for Open-Domain Dialogue Generation" on ArXiv

Semantically Conditioned LSTM-based Natural Language Generation for Spoken Dialogue Systems

Natural language generation (NLG) is a critical component of spoken dialogue and it has a significant impact both on usability and perceived quality. Most NLG systems in common use employ rules and heuristics and tend to generate rigid and stylised responses without the natural variation of human language. They are also not easily scaled to systems covering multiple domains and languages. This paper presents a statistical language generator based on a semantically controlled Long Short-term Memory (LSTM) structure. The LSTM generator can learn from unaligned data by jointly optimising sentence planning and surface realisation using a simple cross entropy training criterion, and language variation can be easily achieved by sampling from output candidates. With fewer heuristics, an objective evaluation in two differing test domains showed the proposed method improved performance compared to previous methods. Human judges scored the LSTM system higher on informativeness and naturalness and overall preferred it to the other systems.Comment: To be appear in EMNLP 201