5,691 research outputs found
Individual and Domain Adaptation in Sentence Planning for Dialogue
One of the biggest challenges in the development and deployment of spoken
dialogue systems is the design of the spoken language generation module. This
challenge arises from the need for the generator to adapt to many features of
the dialogue domain, user population, and dialogue context. A promising
approach is trainable generation, which uses general-purpose linguistic
knowledge that is automatically adapted to the features of interest, such as
the application domain, individual user, or user group. In this paper we
present and evaluate a trainable sentence planner for providing restaurant
information in the MATCH dialogue system. We show that trainable sentence
planning can produce complex information presentations whose quality is
comparable to the output of a template-based generator tuned to this domain. We
also show that our method easily supports adapting the sentence planner to
individuals, and that the individualized sentence planners generally perform
better than models trained and tested on a population of individuals. Previous
work has documented and utilized individual preferences for content selection,
but to our knowledge, these results provide the first demonstration of
individual preferences for sentence planning operations, affecting the content
order, discourse structure and sentence structure of system responses. Finally,
we evaluate the contribution of different feature sets, and show that, in our
application, n-gram features often do as well as features based on higher-level
linguistic representations
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
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