Thinking Globally, Acting Locally: Distantly Supervised Global-to-Local Knowledge Selection for Background Based Conversation

Understand

Background Based Conversations (BBCs) have been introduced to help conversational systems avoid generating overly generic responses.

• In a BBC, the conversation is grounded in a knowledge source.
• A key challenge in BBCs is Knowledge Selection (KS): given a conversational context, try to find the appropriate background knowledge (a text fragment containing related facts or comments, etc.) based on which to generate the next response.
• Previous work addresses KS by employing attention and/or pointer mechanisms.