Enhancing generative conversational service agents with dialog history and external knowledge

For generative conversational agents, especially service-oriented systems, it is of great importance to improve the informativeness of generated responses and avoid bland results. In this paper, we describe our attempt at generating natural and informative responses for customer service oriented dialog systems, by incorporating dialog history related information and external knowledge. Two improved sequence-to-sequence frameworks are proposed to generate responses based on extra information in addition to the current user input, one encodes the entire dialogue history, while the other integrates external knowledge extracted from a search engine. The experimental results on the DSCT6-Track2 and Ubuntu Dialog corpora demonstrate that the proposed systems are promising to generate more informative responses. However, case studies suggest that some particular features of the proposed systems and the datasets might restrict the systems to fully exploit such extra information. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.