Coupled Context Modeling for Deep Chit-Chat: Towards Conversations between Human and Computer

Rui Yan (Peking University); Dongyan Zhao (Peking University)

To have automatic conversations between human and computer is regarded as one of the most hardcore problems in computer science. Conversational systems are of growing importance due to their promising potentials and commercial values as virtual assistants and chatbots. To build such systems with adequate intelligence is challenging, and requires abundant resources including an acquisition of big conversational data and interdisciplinary techniques, such as content analysis, text mining, and retrieval. The arrival of big data era reveals the feasibility to create a conversational system empowered by data-driven approaches. Now we are able to collect an extremely large number of human-human conversations on Web, and organize them to launch human-computer conversational systems. Given a human issued utterance, i.e., a query, a conversational system will search for appropriate responses, conduct relevance ranking using contexts information, and then output the highly relevant result. In this paper, we propose a novel context modeling framework with end-to-end neural networks for human-computer conversational systems. The proposed model is general and unified. In the experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model for human-computer conversations using MAP, nDCG, and MRR metrics.

Promotional Video