Utterance selection using discourse relation filter for chat-oriented dialogue systems

Abstract

We propose a novel utterance selection method for chat-oriented dialogue systems. Many chat-oriented dialogue systems have huge databases of candidate utterances for utterance generation. However, many of these systems have a critical issue in that they select utterances that are inappropriate to the past conversation due to a limitation in contextual understanding. We solve this problem with our proposed method, which uses a discourse relation to the last utterance when selecting an utterance from candidate utterances. We aim to improve the performance of system utterance selection by preferentially selecting an utterance that has a discourse relation to the last utterance. Experimental results with human subjects showed that our proposed method was more effective than previous utterance selection methods.