Topic Shift Detection for Mixed Initiative Response

Abstract

Topic diversion occurs frequently with engaging open-domain dialogue systems like virtual assistants. The balance between staying on topic and rectifying the topic drift is important for a good collaborative system. In this paper, we present a model which uses a finetuned XLNet-base to classify the utterances pertaining to the major topic of conversation and those which are not, with a precision of 84%. We propose a preliminary study, classifying utterances into major, minor and offtopics, which further extends into a system initiative for diversion rectification. A case study was conducted where a system initiative is emulated as a response to the user going off-topic, mimicking a common occurrence of mixed initiative present in natural human-human conversation. This task of classifying utterances into those which belong to the major theme or not, would also help us in identification of relevant sentences for tasks like dialogue summarization and information extraction from conversations.