A Three-Stage Learning Framework for Low-Resource Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Generation

Shilei Liu, Xiaofeng Zhao, Bochao Li, Feiliang Ren, Longhui Zhang, Shujuan Yin


Abstract
Neural conversation models have shown great potentials towards generating fluent and informative responses by introducing external background knowledge. Nevertheless, it is laborious to construct such knowledge-grounded dialogues, and existing models usually perform poorly when transfer to new domains with limited training samples. Therefore, building a knowledge-grounded dialogue system under the low-resource setting is a still crucial issue. In this paper, we propose a novel three-stage learning framework based on weakly supervised learning which benefits from large scale ungrounded dialogues and unstructured knowledge base. To better cooperate with this framework, we devise a variant of Transformer with decoupled decoder which facilitates the disentangled learning of response generation and knowledge incorporation. Evaluation results on two benchmarks indicate that our approach can outperform other state-of-the-art methods with less training data, and even in zero-resource scenario, our approach still performs well.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-main.173
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2262–2272
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.173
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.173
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shilei Liu, Xiaofeng Zhao, Bochao Li, Feiliang Ren, Longhui Zhang, and Shujuan Yin. 2021. A Three-Stage Learning Framework for Low-Resource Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Generation. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 2262–2272, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Three-Stage Learning Framework for Low-Resource Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Generation (Liu et al., EMNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.173.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.173.mp4
Code
 neukg/kat-tslf