AirConcierge: Generating task-oriented dialogue via efficient large-scale knowledge retrieval

Abstract

Despite recent success in neural task-oriented dialogue systems, developing such a real-world system involves accessing large-scale knowledge bases (KBs), which cannot be simply encoded by neural approaches, such as memory network mechanisms. To alleviate the above problem, we propose AirConcierge, an end-to-end trainable text-to-SQL guided framework to learn a neural agent that interacts with KBs using the generated SQL queries. Specifically, the neural agent first learns to ask and confirm the customer’s intent during the multi-turn interactions, then dynamically determining when to ground the user constraints into executable SQL queries so as to fetch relevant information from KBs. With the help of our method, the agent can use less but more accurate fetched results to generate useful responses efficiently, instead of incorporating the entire KBs. We evaluate the proposed method on the AirDialogue dataset, a large corpus released by Google, containing the conversations of customers booking flight tickets from the agent. The experimental results show that AirConcierge significantly improves over previous work in terms of accuracy and the BLEU score, which demonstrates not only the ability to achieve the given task but also the good quality of the generated dialogues.