Conversational Scaffolding: An Analogy-based Approach to Response Prioritization in Open-domain Dialogs

Will Myers, Tyler Etchart, Nancy Fulda

2020

Abstract

We present Conversational Scaffolding, a response-prioritization technique that capitalizes on the structural properties of existing linguistic embedding spaces. Vector offset operations within the embedding space are used to identify an ‘ideal’ response for each set of inputs. Candidate utterances are scored based on their cosine distance from this ideal response, and the top-scoring candidate is selected as conversational output. We apply our method in an open-domain dialog setting and show that the most effective analogy-based strategy outperforms both an Approximate Nearest-Neighbor approach and a naive nearest neighbor baseline. We also demonstrate the method’s ability to retrieve relevant dialog responses from a repository containing 19,665 random sentences. As an additional contribution we present the Chit-Chat dataset, a high-quality conversational dataset containing 483,112 lines of friendly, respectful chat exchanges between university students.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Myers W., Etchart T. and Fulda N. (2020). Conversational Scaffolding: An Analogy-based Approach to Response Prioritization in Open-domain Dialogs. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 2: ICAART, ISBN 978-989-758-395-7, pages 69-78. DOI: 10.5220/0008939900690078

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icaart20,
author={Will Myers and Tyler Etchart and Nancy Fulda},
title={Conversational Scaffolding: An Analogy-based Approach to Response Prioritization in Open-domain Dialogs},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 2: ICAART,},
year={2020},
pages={69-78},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0008939900690078},
isbn={978-989-758-395-7},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 2: ICAART,
TI - Conversational Scaffolding: An Analogy-based Approach to Response Prioritization in Open-domain Dialogs
SN - 978-989-758-395-7
AU - Myers W.
AU - Etchart T.
AU - Fulda N.
PY - 2020
SP - 69
EP - 78
DO - 10.5220/0008939900690078