Sequential Matching Network: A New Architecture for Multi-turn Response Selection in Retrieval-based Chatbots
This addresses the challenge of selecting appropriate responses in multi-turn conversations for chatbot applications, representing an incremental advancement over existing methods.
The paper tackles the problem of response selection in multi-turn retrieval-based chatbots by proposing a Sequential Matching Network (SMN) that matches responses with each utterance at multiple granularities and models utterance relationships, achieving significant performance improvements over state-of-the-art methods on two public datasets.
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 utterances or important contextual information. 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 utterances. The final matching score is calculated with the hidden states of the RNN. An 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.