Answering complex questions is a time-consuming activity for humans that requires reasoning and integration of information. Recent work on reading comprehension made headway in answering simple questions, but tackling complex questions is still an ongoing research challenge. Conversely, semantic parsers have been successful at handling compositionality, but only when the information resides in a target knowledge-base. In this paper, we present a novel framework for answering broad and complex questions, assuming answering simple questions is possible using a search engine and a reading comprehension model. We propose to decompose complex questions into a sequence of simple questions, and compute the final answer from the sequence of answers. To illustrate the viability of our approach, we create a new dataset of complex questions, ComplexWebQuestions, and present a model that decomposes questions and interacts with the web to compute an answer. We empirically demonstrate that question decomposition improves performance from 20.8 precision@1 to 27.5 precision@1 on this new dataset.

The Web as a Knowledge-base for Answering Complex Questions

This paper introduces Doc2Bot, a novel dataset for building machines that help users seek information via conversations. This is of particular interest for companies and organizations that own a large number of manuals or instruction books. Despite its potential, the nature of our task poses several challenges: (1) documents contain various structures that hinder the ability of machines to comprehend, and (2) user information needs are often underspecified. Compared to prior datasets that either focus on a single structural type or overlook the role of questioning to uncover user needs, the Doc2Bot dataset is developed to target such challenges systematically. Our dataset contains over 100,000 turns based on Chinese documents from five domains, larger than any prior document-grounded dialog dataset for information seeking. We propose three tasks in Doc2Bot: (1) dialog state tracking to track user intentions, (2) dialog policy learning to plan system actions and contents, and (3) response generation which generates responses based on the outputs of the dialog policy. Baseline methods based on the latest deep learning models are presented, indicating that our proposed tasks are challenging and worthy of further research.

Doc2Bot: Accessing Heterogeneous Documents via Conversational Bots

Multimodal search-based dialogue is a challenging new task: It extends visually grounded question answering systems into multi-turn conversations with access to an external database. We address this new challenge by learning a neural response generation system from the recently released Multimodal Dialogue (MMD) dataset (Saha et al., 2017). We introduce a knowledge-grounded multimodal conversational model where an encoded knowledge base (KB) representation is appended to the decoder input. Our model substantially outperforms strong baselines in terms of text-based similarity measures (over 9 BLEU points, 3 of which are solely due to the use of additional information from the KB.

A Knowledge-Grounded Multimodal Search-Based Conversational Agent

Spoken Language Understanding (SLU), a core component of the task-oriented dialogue system, expects a shorter inference facing the impatience of human users. Existing work increases inference speed by designing non-autoregressive models for single-turn SLU tasks but fails to apply to multi-turn SLU in confronting the dialogue history. The intuitive idea is to concatenate all historical utterances and utilize the non-autoregressive models directly. However, this approach seriously misses the salient historical information and suffers from the uncoordinated-slot problems. To overcome those shortcomings, we propose a novel model for multi-turn SLU named Salient History Attention with Layer-Refined Transformer (SHA-LRT), which comprises a SHA module, a Layer-Refined Mechanism (LRM), and a Slot Label Generation (SLG) task. SHA captures salient historical information for the current dialogue from both historical utterances and results via a well-designed history-attention mechanism. LRM predicts preliminary SLU results from Transformer’s middle states and utilizes them to guide the final prediction, and SLG obtains the sequential dependency information for the non-autoregressive encoder. Experiments on public datasets indicate that our model significantly improves multi-turn SLU performance (17.5% on Overall) with accelerating (nearly 15 times) the inference process over the state-of-the-art baseline as well as effective on the single-turn SLU tasks.

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Capture Salient Historical Information: A Fast and Accurate Non-autoregressive Model for Multi-turn Spoken Language Understanding

Users on the internet usually have conversations on interesting facts or topics along with diverse knowledge from the web. However, most existing knowledge-grounded conversation models consider only a single document regarding the topic of a conversation. The recently proposed retrieval-augmented models generate a response based on multiple documents; however, they ignore the given topic and use only the local context of the conversation. To this end, we introduce a novel retrieval-augmented response generation model that retrieves an appropriate range of documents relevant to both the topic and local context of a conversation and uses them for generating a knowledge-grounded response. Our model first accepts both topic words extracted from the whole conversation and the tokens before the response to yield multiple representations. It then chooses representations of the first N token and ones of keywords from the conversation and document encoders and compares the two groups of representation from the conversation with those groups of the document, respectively. For training, we introduce a new data-weighting scheme to encourage the model to produce knowledge-grounded responses without ground truth knowledge. Both automatic and human evaluation results with a large-scale dataset show that our models can generate more knowledgeable, diverse, and relevant responses compared to the state-of-the-art models.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/ielx7/6287639/6514899/09982598.pdf

Retrieval-Augmented Response Generation for Knowledge-Grounded Conversation in the Wild

Incorporating external knowledge into dialogue generation has been proven to benefit the performance of an open-domain Dialogue System (DS), such as generating informative or stylized responses, co...

ZhangWei-Nan

Papers

Unstructured Text Enhanced Open-Domain Dialogue System: A Systematic Survey