A Document-grounded Matching Network for Response Selection in Retrieval-based Chatbots

A Document-grounded Matching Network for Response Selection in Retrieval-based Chatbots

Xueliang Zhao, Chongyang Tao, Wei Wu, Can Xu, Dongyan Zhao, Rui Yan

Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 5443-5449. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2019/756

We present a document-grounded matching network (DGMN) for response selection that can power a knowledge-aware retrieval-based chatbot system. The challenges of building such a model lie in how to ground conversation contexts with background documents and how to recognize important information in the documents for matching. To overcome the challenges, DGMN fuses information in a document and a context into representations of each other, and dynamically determines if grounding is necessary and importance of different parts of the document and the context through hierarchical interaction with a response at the matching step. Empirical studies on two public data sets indicate that DGMN can significantly improve upon state-of-the-art methods and at the same time enjoys good interpretability.
Keywords:
Natural Language Processing: Dialogue
Natural Language Processing: Information Retrieval