SIGdial 2018

19th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue

Addressing Objects and Their Relations: The Conversational Entity Dialogue Model

Stefan Ultes, Pawel Budzianowski, Inigo Casanueva, Lina M. Rojas Barahona, Bo-Hsiang Tseng, Yen-chen Wu, Steve Young, Milica Gasic

Statistical spoken dialogue systems usually rely on a single- or multi-domain dialogue model that is restricted in its capabilitis of modelling complex dialogue structures, e.g., relations. In this work, we propose a novel dialogue model that is centred around entities and is able to model relations as well as multiple entities of the same type. We demonstrate in a prototype implementation benefits of relation modelling on the dialogue level and show that a trained policy using these relations outperforms the multi-domain baseline. Furthermore, we show that by modelling the relations on the dialogue level, the system is capable of processing relations present in the user input and even learns to address them in the system response.