TopicRefine: Joint Topic Prediction and Dialogue Response Generation for Multi-turn End-to-End Dialogue System

Understand

A multi-turn dialogue always follows a specific topic thread, and topic shift at the discourse level occurs naturally as the conversation progresses, necessitating the model's ability to capture different topics and generate topic-aware responses.

• Previous research has either predicted the topic first and then generated the relevant response, or simply applied the attention mechanism to all topics, ignoring the joint distribution of the topic prediction and response generation models and resulting in uncontrollable and unrelated responses.
• In this paper, we propose a joint framework with a topic refinement mechanism to learn these two tasks simultaneously.
• Specifically, we design a three-pass iteration mechanism to generate coarse response first, then predict corresponding topics, and finally generate refined response conditioned on predicted topics.