Discourse Relation-Aware Multi-turn Dialogue Response Generation

Huijie Wang, Ruifang He, Yungang Jia, Jing Xu, Bo Wang

Abstract: Multi-turn dialogue response generation aims to generate a response with consideration of the context. It is not equal to multiple single-turn dialogues due to the context dependence of response. Many existing models achieve great success for response generation, but they still struggle to model the contextual semantics of dialogue history. Sequence models have difficulties to explore the interactive relations between contextual utterances, which affects the coherence of generated responses. To solve the issue, we propose a discourse relation-aware model, which encodes the contextual utterances with a directed acyclic graph neural network (DAGNN) with constraints on dialogue-specific discourse relations to better model the intrinsic structure. Besides, we introduce an auxiliary discourse relation recognition task to enhance the model’s ability of representing the context. Extensive experimental results show that our proposed model outperforms baselines.