Contextual Modeling in Context-Aware Conversation Systems

Conversation modeling is an important and challenging task in the field of natural language processing because it is a key component promoting the development of automated human-machine conversation. Most recent research concerning conversation modeling focuses only on the current utterance (considered as the current question) to generate a response, and thus fails to capture the conversation's logic from its beginning. Some studies concatenate the current question with previous conversation sentences and use it as input for response generation. Another approach is to use an encoder to store all previous utterances. Each time a new question is encountered, the encoder is updated and used to generate the response. Our approach in this paper differs from previous studies in that we explicitly separate the encoding of the question from the encoding of its context. This results in different encoding models for the question and the context, capturing the specificity of each. In this way, we have access to the entire context when generating the response. To this end, we propose a deep neural network-based model, called the Context Model, to encode previous utterances' information and combine it with the current question. This approach satisfies the need for context information while keeping the different roles of the current question and its context separate while generating a response. We investigate two approaches for representing the context: Long short-term memory and Convolutional neural network. Experiments show that our Context Model outperforms a baseline model on both ConvAI2 Dataset and a collected dataset of conversational English.