Relational Temporal Graph Reasoning for Dual-Task Dialogue Language Understanding

Bowen Xing, Ivor W. Tsang

Abstract: Dual-task dialog language understanding aims to tackle two correlative dialog language understanding tasks simultaneously via leveraging their inherent correlations. In this paper, we put forward a new framework, whose core is relational temporal graph reasoning. We propose a speaker-aware temporal graph (SATG) and a dual-task relational temporal graph (DRTG) to facilitate relational temporal modeling in dialog understanding and dual-task reasoning. Besides, different from previous works that only achieve implicit semantics-level interactions, we propose to model the explicit dependencies via integrating prediction-level interactions . To implement our framework, we first propose a novel model D ual-t A sk temporal R elational r E current R easoning network ( DARER ), which first generates the context-, speaker- and temporal-sensitive utterance representations through relational temporal modeling of SATG, then conducts recurrent dual-task relational temporal graph reasoning on DRTG, in which process the estimated label distributions act as key clues in prediction-level interactions. And the relational temporal modeling in DARER is achieved by relational graph convolutional networks (RGCNs). Then we further propose Re lational Te mporal Trans former ( ReTeFormer ), which achieves fine-grained relational temporal modeling via Relation- and Structure-aware Disentangled Multi-head Attention. Accordingly, we propose DARER with R eTeFormer ( DARER$^{\mathbf{2}}$2 ), which adopts two variants of ReTeFormer to achieve the relational temporal modeling of SATG and DTRG, respectively. The extensive experiments on different scenarios verify that our models outperform state-of-the-art models by a large margin. Remarkably, on the dialog sentiment classification task in the Mastodon dataset, DARER and DARER $^{2}$ gain relative improvements of about 28% and 34% over the previous best model in terms of F1.