MALA: Cross-domain dialogue generation with action learning

Abstract

Response generation for task-oriented dialogues involves two basic components: dialogue planning and surface realization. These two components, however, have a discrepancy in their objectives, i.e., task completion and language quality. To deal with such discrepancy, conditioned response generation has been introduced where the generation process is factorized into action decision and language generation via explicit action representations. To obtain action representations, recent studies learn latent actions in an unsupervised manner based on the utterance lexical similarity. Such an action learning approach is prone to diversities of language surfaces, which may impinge task completion and..