Augmenting dialogue generation using dialogue act embeddings: a transfer learning approach

Abstract

The following work looks at contemporary end-to-end dialogue systems with the aim of improving dialogue generation in an open-domain setting. It provides an overview of popular literature in the domain of dialogue generation, followed by a brief look at how human dialogue is understood from the perspective of Linguistics and Cognitive Science. We try to extract useful ideas from these domains of research and implement them in a transfer learning approach where a pretrained language model is supplemented with dialogue act information using special embeddings. The hypothesis behind the proposed approach is that the dialogue act information will aid the generation process. The proposed approach is then compared with a baseline approach on their performance on the DailyDialog[12] dataset using perplexity as the evaluation metric. Though the proposed approach is a significant improvement over the baseline, the contribution of the Dialogue Act Embeddings in the development is shown to be marginal via ablation analysis.