A Neural Method for Goal-Oriented Dialog Systems to interact with Named Entities

Janarthanan Rajendran, Jatin Ganhotra, Xiaoxiao Guo, Mo Yu, Satinder Singh

Abstract: Many goal-oriented dialog tasks, especially ones in which the dialog system has to interact with external knowledge sources such as databases, have to handle a large number of Named Entities (NEs). There are at least two challenges in handling NEs using neural methods in such settings: individual NEs may occur only rarely making it hard to learn good representations of them, and many of the Out Of Vocabulary words that occur during test time may be NEs. Thus, the need to interact well with these NEs has emerged as a serious challenge to building neural methods for goal-oriented dialog tasks. In this paper, we propose a new neural method for this problem, and present empirical evaluations on a structured Question answering task and three related goal-oriented dialog tasks that show that our proposed method can be effective in interacting with NEs in these settings.

Keywords: Named Entities, Neural methods, Goal oriented dialog