DialogActs based Search and Retrieval for Response Generation in Conversation Systems

Designing robust conversation systems with great customer experience requires a team of design experts to think of all probable ways a customer can interact with the system and then author responses for each use case individually. The responses are authored from scratch for each new client and application even though similar responses have been created in the past. This happens largely because the responses are encoded using domain specific set of intents and entities. In this paper, we present preliminary work to define a dialog act schema to merge and map responses from different domains and applications using a consistent domain-independent representation. These representations are stored and maintained using an Elasticsearch system to facilitate generation of responses through a search and retrieval process. We experimented generating different surface realizations for a response given a desired information state of the dialog.