Knowledge-Graph Driven Information State Approach to Dialog

Svetlana Stoyanchev, Michael Johnston

Abstract: A modular conversational dialog system, in contrast to end-to-end, includes natural language understanding, dialog management, and natural language generation components. A dialog system framework simplifies development and maintenance of modular dialog systems. We propose a knowledge graph driven framework (KGD) based on the Information State Update (ISU) approach and adapted for practical task oriented applications. With the proposed framework, a system is defined declaratively by describing the information structure of a domain. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach in enabling rich conversational dialog in food ordering domain.