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Journal ArticleDOI

Augmenting Transformers with KNN-Based Composite Memory for Dialog

04 Mar 2021-Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (MIT Press - Journals)-Vol. 9, pp 82-99
TL;DR: This article propose augmenting GNNs with KNN-based information fetching (KIF) modules to access fixed external knowledge, such as Wikipedia, images, and human-written dialog utterances.
Abstract: Various machine learning tasks can benefit from access to external information of different modalities, such as text and images. Recent work has focused on learning architectures with large memories capable of storing this knowledge. We propose augmenting generative Transformer neural networks with KNN-based Information Fetching (KIF) modules. Each KIF module learns a read operation to access fixed external knowledge. We apply these modules to generative dialog modeling, a challenging task where information must be flexibly retrieved and incorporated to maintain the topic and flow of conversation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by identifying relevant knowledge required for knowledgeable but engaging dialog from Wikipedia, images, and human-written dialog utterances, and show that leveraging this retrieved information improves model performance, measured by automatic and human evaluation.

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Citations
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Posted Content
Kurt Shuster1, Spencer Poff1, Moya Chen1, Douwe Kiela1, Jason Weston1 
TL;DR: This paper explore the use of neural retrieval-in-the-loop architectures for knowledge-grounded dialogue, a task that is arguably more challenging as it requires querying based on complex multi-turn dialogue context and generating conversationally coherent responses.
Abstract: Despite showing increasingly human-like conversational abilities, state-of-the-art dialogue models often suffer from factual incorrectness and hallucination of knowledge (Roller et al., 2020). In this work we explore the use of neural-retrieval-in-the-loop architectures - recently shown to be effective in open-domain QA (Lewis et al., 2020b; Izacard and Grave, 2020) - for knowledge-grounded dialogue, a task that is arguably more challenging as it requires querying based on complex multi-turn dialogue context and generating conversationally coherent responses. We study various types of architectures with multiple components - retrievers, rankers, and encoder-decoders - with the goal of maximizing knowledgeability while retaining conversational ability. We demonstrate that our best models obtain state-of-the-art performance on two knowledge-grounded conversational tasks. The models exhibit open-domain conversational capabilities, generalize effectively to scenarios not within the training data, and, as verified by human evaluations, substantially reduce the well-known problem of knowledge hallucination in state-of-the-art chatbots.

35 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A memory-augmented approach to condition an autoregressive language model on a knowledge graph that represents the graph as a collection of relation triples and retrieve relevant relations for a given context to improve text generation.
Abstract: We present a memory-augmented approach to condition an autoregressive language model on a knowledge graph. We represent the graph as a collection of relation triples and retrieve relevant relations for a given context to improve text generation. Experiments on WikiText-103, WMT19, and enwik8 English datasets demonstrate that our approach produces a better language model in terms of perplexity and bits per character. We also show that relational memory improves coherence, is complementary to token-based memory, and enables causal interventions. Our model provides a simple yet effective way to combine an autoregressive language model and a knowledge graph for more coherent and logical generation.

15 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
MaLongxuan1, LiMingda1, ZhangWei-Nan1, LiJiapeng1, LiuTing1 
TL;DR: 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.
Abstract: 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...

12 citations

Proceedings Article
Kurt Shuster1, Spencer Poff1, Moya Chen1, Douwe Kiela1, Jason Weston1 
15 Apr 2021
TL;DR: This paper explore the use of neural retrieval-in-the-loop architectures for knowledge-grounded dialogue, a task that is arguably more challenging as it requires querying based on complex multi-turn dialogue context and generating conversationally coherent responses.
Abstract: Despite showing increasingly human-like conversational abilities, state-of-the-art dialogue models often suffer from factual incorrectness and hallucination of knowledge (Roller et al., 2020). In this work we explore the use of neural-retrieval-in-the-loop architectures - recently shown to be effective in open-domain QA (Lewis et al., 2020b; Izacard and Grave, 2020) - for knowledge-grounded dialogue, a task that is arguably more challenging as it requires querying based on complex multi-turn dialogue context and generating conversationally coherent responses. We study various types of architectures with multiple components - retrievers, rankers, and encoder-decoders - with the goal of maximizing knowledgeability while retaining conversational ability. We demonstrate that our best models obtain state-of-the-art performance on two knowledge-grounded conversational tasks. The models exhibit open-domain conversational capabilities, generalize effectively to scenarios not within the training data, and, as verified by human evaluations, substantially reduce the well-known problem of knowledge hallucination in state-of-the-art chatbots.

5 citations

Posted Content
TL;DR: The authors proposed an end-to-end differentiable training method for retrieval-augmented open-domain question answering systems that combine information from multiple retrieved documents when generating answers, using an expectation-maximization algorithm.
Abstract: We present an end-to-end differentiable training method for retrieval-augmented open-domain question answering systems that combine information from multiple retrieved documents when generating answers. We model retrieval decisions as latent variables over sets of relevant documents. Since marginalizing over sets of retrieved documents is computationally hard, we approximate this using an expectation-maximization algorithm. We iteratively estimate the value of our latent variable (the set of relevant documents for a given question) and then use this estimate to update the retriever and reader parameters. We hypothesize that such end-to-end training allows training signals to flow to the reader and then to the retriever better than staged-wise training. This results in a retriever that is able to select more relevant documents for a question and a reader that is trained on more accurate documents to generate an answer. Experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms all existing approaches of comparable size by 2-3% absolute exact match points, achieving new state-of-the-art results. Our results also demonstrate the feasibility of learning to retrieve to improve answer generation without explicit supervision of retrieval decisions.

5 citations

References
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Proceedings Article
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Proceedings ArticleDOI
21 Jul 2017
TL;DR: ResNeXt as discussed by the authors is a simple, highly modularized network architecture for image classification, which is constructed by repeating a building block that aggregates a set of transformations with the same topology.
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7,183 citations

Proceedings ArticleDOI
12 Aug 2016
TL;DR: This paper introduces a simpler and more effective approach, making the NMT model capable of open-vocabulary translation by encoding rare and unknown words as sequences of subword units, and empirically shows that subword models improve over a back-off dictionary baseline for the WMT 15 translation tasks English-German and English-Russian by 1.3 BLEU.
Abstract: Neural machine translation (NMT) models typically operate with a fixed vocabulary, but translation is an open-vocabulary problem. Previous work addresses the translation of out-of-vocabulary words by backing off to a dictionary. In this paper, we introduce a simpler and more effective approach, making the NMT model capable of open-vocabulary translation by encoding rare and unknown words as sequences of subword units. This is based on the intuition that various word classes are translatable via smaller units than words, for instance names (via character copying or transliteration), compounds (via compositional translation), and cognates and loanwords (via phonological and morphological transformations). We discuss the suitability of different word segmentation techniques, including simple character ngram models and a segmentation based on the byte pair encoding compression algorithm, and empirically show that subword models improve over a back-off dictionary baseline for the WMT 15 translation tasks English!German and English!Russian by up to 1.1 and 1.3 BLEU, respectively.

6,898 citations

Proceedings Article
12 Feb 2016
TL;DR: The authors extend the hierarchical recurrent encoder-decoder neural network to the dialogue domain, and demonstrate that this model is competitive with state-of-the-art neural language models and backoff n-gram models.
Abstract: We investigate the task of building open domain, conversational dialogue systems based on large dialogue corpora using generative models. Generative models produce system responses that are autonomously generated word-by-word, opening up the possibility for realistic, flexible interactions. In support of this goal, we extend the recently proposed hierarchical recurrent encoder-decoder neural network to the dialogue domain, and demonstrate that this model is competitive with state-of-the-art neural language models and backoff n-gram models. We investigate the limitations of this and similar approaches, and show how its performance can be improved by bootstrapping the learning from a larger question-answer pair corpus and from pretrained word embeddings.

1,533 citations