A Survey on Dialogue Systems: Recent Advances and New Frontiers

Dialogue systems have attracted more and more attention. Recent advances on dialogue systems are overwhelmingly contributed by deep learning techniques, which have been employed to enhance a wide range of big data applications such as computer vision, natural language processing, and recommender systems. For dialogue systems, deep learning can leverage a massive amount of data to learn meaningful feature representations and response generation strategies, while requiring a minimum amount of hand-crafting. In this article, we give an overview to these recent advances on dialogue systems from various perspectives and discuss some possible research directions. In particular, we generally divide existing dialogue systems into task-oriented and non-task-oriented models, then detail how deep learning techniques help them with representative algorithms and finally discuss some appealing research directions that can bring the dialogue system research into a new frontier.Comment: 13 pages. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1703.01008 by other author

The Design and Implementation of XiaoIce, an Empathetic Social Chatbot

This paper describes the development of Microsoft XiaoIce, the most popular social chatbot in the world. XiaoIce is uniquely designed as an AI companion with an emotional connection to satisfy the human need for communication, affection, and social belonging. We take into account both intelligent quotient (IQ) and emotional quotient (EQ) in system design, cast human-machine social chat as decision-making over Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), and optimize XiaoIce for long-term user engagement, measured in expected Conversation-turns Per Session (CPS). We detail the system architecture and key components including dialogue manager, core chat, skills, and an empathetic computing module. We show how XiaoIce dynamically recognizes human feelings and states, understands user intent, and responds to user needs throughout long conversations. Since her launch in 2014, XiaoIce has communicated with over 660 million active users and succeeded in establishing long-term relationships with many of them. Analysis of large scale online logs shows that XiaoIce has achieved an average CPS of 23, which is significantly higher than that of other chatbots and even human conversations

Neural Matching Models for Question Retrieval and Next Question Prediction in Conversation

The recent boom of AI has seen the emergence of many human-computer conversation systems such as Google Assistant, Microsoft Cortana, Amazon Echo and Apple Siri. We introduce and formalize the task of predicting questions in conversations, where the goal is to predict the new question that the user will ask, given the past conversational context. This task can be modeled as a "sequence matching" problem, where two sequences are given and the aim is to learn a model that maps any pair of sequences to a matching probability. Neural matching models, which adopt deep neural networks to learn sequence representations and matching scores, have attracted immense research interests of information retrieval and natural language processing communities. In this paper, we first study neural matching models for the question retrieval task that has been widely explored in the literature, whereas the effectiveness of neural models for this task is relatively unstudied. We further evaluate the neural matching models in the next question prediction task in conversations. We have used the publicly available Quora data and Ubuntu chat logs in our experiments. Our evaluations investigate the potential of neural matching models with representation learning for question retrieval and next question prediction in conversations. Experimental results show that neural matching models perform well for both tasks.Comment: Neu-IR 2017: The SIGIR 2017 Workshop on Neural Information Retrieval (SIGIR Neu-IR 2017), Tokyo, Japan, August 7-11, 201

A Hybrid Retrieval-Generation Neural Conversation Model

Intelligent personal assistant systems that are able to have multi-turn conversations with human users are becoming increasingly popular. Most previous research has been focused on using either retrieval-based or generation-based methods to develop such systems. Retrieval-based methods have the advantage of returning fluent and informative responses with great diversity. However, the performance of the methods is limited by the size of the response repository. On the other hand, generation-based methods can produce highly coherent responses on any topics. But the generated responses are often generic and not informative due to the lack of grounding knowledge. In this paper, we propose a hybrid neural conversation model that combines the merits of both response retrieval and generation methods. Experimental results on Twitter and Foursquare data show that the proposed model outperforms both retrieval-based methods and generation-based methods (including a recently proposed knowledge-grounded neural conversation model) under both automatic evaluation metrics and human evaluation. We hope that the findings in this study provide new insights on how to integrate text retrieval and text generation models for building conversation systems.Comment: Accepted as a Full Paper in CIKM 2019. 10 page

Modeling Multi-turn Conversation with Deep Utterance Aggregation

Multi-turn conversation understanding is a major challenge for building intelligent dialogue systems. This work focuses on retrieval-based response matching for multi-turn conversation whose related work simply concatenates the conversation utterances, ignoring the interactions among previous utterances for context modeling. In this paper, we formulate previous utterances into context using a proposed deep utterance aggregation model to form a fine-grained context representation. In detail, a self-matching attention is first introduced to route the vital information in each utterance. Then the model matches a response with each refined utterance and the final matching score is obtained after attentive turns aggregation. Experimental results show our model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on three multi-turn conversation benchmarks, including a newly introduced e-commerce dialogue corpus.Comment: Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2018

Neural Approaches to Conversational AI

The present paper surveys neural approaches to conversational AI that have been developed in the last few years. We group conversational systems into three categories: (1) question answering agents, (2) task-oriented dialogue agents, and (3) chatbots. For each category, we present a review of state-of-the-art neural approaches, draw the connection between them and traditional approaches, and discuss the progress that has been made and challenges still being faced, using specific systems and models as case studies.Comment: Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval (95 pages

AI-Powered Text Generation for Harmonious Human-Machine Interaction: Current State and Future Directions

In the last two decades, the landscape of text generation has undergone tremendous changes and is being reshaped by the success of deep learning. New technologies for text generation ranging from template-based methods to neural network-based methods emerged. Meanwhile, the research objectives have also changed from generating smooth and coherent sentences to infusing personalized traits to enrich the diversification of newly generated content. With the rapid development of text generation solutions, one comprehensive survey is urgent to summarize the achievements and track the state of the arts. In this survey paper, we present the general systematical framework, illustrate the widely utilized models and summarize the classic applications of text generation.Comment: Accepted by IEEE UIC 201

A Sequential Matching Framework for Multi-turn Response Selection in Retrieval-based Chatbots

We study the problem of response selection for multi-turn conversation in retrieval-based chatbots. The task requires matching a response candidate with a conversation context, whose challenges include how to recognize important parts of the context, and how to model the relationships among utterances in the context. Existing matching methods may lose important information in contexts as we can interpret them with a unified framework in which contexts are transformed to fixed-length vectors without any interaction with responses before matching. The analysis motivates us to propose a new matching framework that can sufficiently carry the important information in contexts to matching and model the relationships among utterances at the same time. The new framework, which we call a sequential matching framework (SMF), lets each utterance in a context interacts with a response candidate at the first step and transforms the pair to a matching vector. The matching vectors are then accumulated following the order of the utterances in the context with a recurrent neural network (RNN) which models the relationships among the utterances. The context-response matching is finally calculated with the hidden states of the RNN. Under SMF, we propose a sequential convolutional network and sequential attention network and conduct experiments on two public data sets to test their performance. Experimental results show that both models can significantly outperform the state-of-the-art matching methods. We also show that the models are interpretable with visualizations that provide us insights on how they capture and leverage the important information in contexts for matching.Comment: Submitted to Computational Linguistic

Improving Retrieval Modeling Using Cross Convolution Networks And Multi Frequency Word Embedding

To build a satisfying chatbot that has the ability of managing a goal-oriented multi-turn dialogue, accurate modeling of human conversation is crucial. In this paper we concentrate on the task of response selection for multi-turn human-computer conversation with a given context. Previous approaches show weakness in capturing information of rare keywords that appear in either or both context and correct response, and struggle with long input sequences. We propose Cross Convolution Network (CCN) and Multi Frequency word embedding to address both problems. We train several models using the Ubuntu Dialogue dataset which is the largest freely available multi-turn based dialogue corpus. We further build an ensemble model by averaging predictions of multiple models. We achieve a new state-of-the-art on this dataset with considerable improvements compared to previous best results

RubyStar: A Non-Task-Oriented Mixture Model Dialog System

RubyStar is a dialog system designed to create "human-like" conversation by combining different response generation strategies. RubyStar conducts a non-task-oriented conversation on general topics by using an ensemble of rule-based, retrieval-based and generative methods. Topic detection, engagement monitoring, and context tracking are used for managing interaction. Predictable elements of conversation, such as the bot's backstory and simple question answering are handled by separate modules. We describe a rating scheme we developed for evaluating response generation. We find that character-level RNN is an effective generation model for general responses, with proper parameter settings; however other kinds of conversation topics might benefit from using other models