A Knowledge-Grounded Task-Oriented Dialogue System with Hierarchical Structure for Enhancing Knowledge Selection

Abstract

For a task-oriented dialogue system to provide appropriate answers to and services for users’ questions, it is necessary for it to be able to utilize knowledge related to the topic of the conversation. Therefore, the system should be able to select the most appropriate knowledge snippet from the knowledge base, where external unstructured knowledge is used to respond to user requests that cannot be solved by the internal knowledge addressed by the database or application programming interface. Therefore, this paper constructs a three-step knowledge-grounded task-oriented dialogue system with knowledge-seeking-turn detection, knowledge selection, and knowledge-grounded generation. In particular, we propose a hierarchical structure of domain-classification, entity-extraction, and snippet-ranking tasks by subdividing the knowledge selection step. Each task is performed through the pre-trained language model with advanced techniques to finally determine the knowledge snippet to be used to generate a response. Furthermore, the domain and entity information obtained because of the previous task is used as knowledge to reduce the search range of candidates, thereby improving the performance and efficiency of knowledge selection and proving it through experiments.