Sequential Matching Network: A New Architecture for Multi-turn Response Selection in Retrieval-Based Chatbots

Yu Wu, Wei Wu, Chen Xing, Ming Zhou, Zhoujun Li


Abstract
We study response selection for multi-turn conversation in retrieval based chatbots. Existing work either concatenates utterances in context or matches a response with a highly abstract context vector finally, which may lose relationships among the utterances or important information in the context. We propose a sequential matching network (SMN) to address both problems. SMN first matches a response with each utterance in the context on multiple levels of granularity, and distills important matching information from each pair as a vector with convolution and pooling operations. The vectors are then accumulated in a chronological order through a recurrent neural network (RNN) which models relationships among the utterances. The final matching score is calculated with the hidden states of the RNN. Empirical study on two public data sets shows that SMN can significantly outperform state-of-the-art methods for response selection in multi-turn conversation.
Anthology ID:
P17-1046
Volume:
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2017
Address:
Vancouver, Canada
Editors:
Regina Barzilay, Min-Yen Kan
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
496–505
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P17-1046
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P17-1046
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yu Wu, Wei Wu, Chen Xing, Ming Zhou, and Zhoujun Li. 2017. Sequential Matching Network: A New Architecture for Multi-turn Response Selection in Retrieval-Based Chatbots. In Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 496–505, Vancouver, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Sequential Matching Network: A New Architecture for Multi-turn Response Selection in Retrieval-Based Chatbots (Wu et al., ACL 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P17-1046.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/P17-1046.mp4
Code
 MarkWuNLP/MultiTurnResponseSelection +  additional community code
Data
DoubanDouban Conversation CorpusE-commerceRRSUDC