Predicting success in goal-driven human-human dialogues

Abstract

In goal-driven dialogue systems, success is often defined based on a structured definition of the goal. This requires that the dialogue system be constrained to handle a specific class of goals and that there be a mechanism to measure success with respect to that goal. However, in many human-human dialogues the diversity of goals makes it infeasible to define success in such a way. To address this scenario, we consider the task of automatically predicting success in goal-driven human-human dialogues using only the information communicated between participants in the form of text. We build a dataset from stackoverflow.com which consists of exchanges between two users in the technical domain where ground-truth success labels are available. We then propose a turn-based hierarchical neural network model that can be used to predict success without requiring a structured goal definition. We show this model outperforms rule-based heuristics and other baselines as it is able to detect patterns over the course of a dialogue and capture notions such as gratitude.