Saliency infused dialogue response generation: Improving task oriented text generation using feature attribution

Abstract

Challenges persist in dialogue scenarios, particularly in multi-turn dialogues where response generation often disregards contextual information beyond the last user utterance, resulting in fluent yet inadequate responses. This paper addresses these issues by identifying and resolving common shortcomings in base model responses during response generation and proposes methods to enhance response quality in unannotated dialogue settings. Our approach involves augmenting information from multiple sources, including keywords, salient features, and knowledge graph triples. We compare the effectiveness of these methods against both the base model and human annotation, which includes dialogue acts and entities. Our findings demonstrate that appending extracted tokens significantly enhances response quality compared to annotated information. In task-oriented dialogue, models perform best when infused with saliency and knowledge graph triples, as shown in the MultiWOZ dataset. Conversely, focusing solely on saliency yields better results for open-domain dialogue, as demonstrated with the DailyDialog dataset. For contextual relevance, the information infusion could also approach the performance of the LLama2 model with only a tenth of the available parameters.