UniKDD: A Unified Generative model for Knowledge-driven Dialogue

Abstract

knowledge-driven dialogue (KDD) is to introduce an external knowledge base, generating an informative and fluent response. However, previous works employ different models to conduct the sub-tasks of KDD, ignoring the connection between sub-tasks and resulting in a difficulty of training and inference. To solve those issues above, we propose the UniKDD, a unified generative model for KDD, which models all sub-tasks into a generation task, enhancing the connection between tasks and facilitating the training and inference. Specifically, UniKDD simplifies the complex KDD tasks into three main sub-tasks, i.e., entity prediction, attribute prediction, and dialogue generation. These tasks are transformed into a text generation task and trained by an end-to-end way. In the inference phase, UniKDD first predicts a set of entities used for current turn dialogue according to the dialogue history. Then, for each predicted entity, UniKDD predicts the corresponding attributes by the dialogue history. Finally, UniKDD generates a high-quality and informative response using the dialogue history and predicted knowledge triplets. The experimental results show that our proposed UniKDD can perform KDD task well and outperform the baseline on the evaluation of knowledge selection and response generation. The code is available at https://github.com/qianandfei/UniKDD.git.