SIGdial 2017

18th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue

Generative Encoder-Decoder Models for Task-Oriented Spoken Dialog Systems with Chatting Capability

Tiancheng Zhao, Allen Lu, Kyusong Lee and Maxine Eskenazi

Generative encoder-decoder models offer great promise in developing domaingeneral dialog systems. However, they have mainly been applied to open-domain conversations. This paper presents a practical and novel framework for building task-oriented dialog systems based on encoder-decoder models. This framework enables encoder-decoder models to accomplish slot-value independent decision-making and interact with external databases. Moreover, this paper shows the flexibility of the proposed method by interleaving chatting capability with a slot- filling system for better out-of-domain recovery. The models were trained on both real-user data from a bus information system and human-human chat data. Results show that the proposed framework achieves good performance in both offline evaluation metrics and in task success rate with human users.