Semantic Representation for Dialogue Modeling

Abstract

Although neural models have achieved competitive results in dialogue systems, they have shown limited ability in representing core semantics, such as ignoring important entities. To this end, we exploit Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) to help dialogue modeling. Compared with the textual input, AMR explicitly provides core semantic knowledge and reduces data sparsity. We develop an algorithm to construct dialogue-level AMR graphs from sentence-level AMRs and explore two ways to incorporate AMRs into dialogue systems. Experimental results on both dialogue understanding and response generation tasks show the superiority of our model. To our knowledge, we are the first to leverage a formal semantic representation into neural dialogue modeling.

Publication
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, (ACL/IJCNLP, CCF-A), (Volume 1: Long Papers), Virtual Event, August 1-6, 2021
Xuefeng Bai
Xuefeng Bai
Ph.D candidate

My research interests include semantics, dialogues and generation.