Semantically Conditioned LSTM-based Natural Language Generation for Spoken Dialogue Systems

Natural language generation (NLG) is a critical component of spoken dialogue and it has a significant impact both on usability and perceived quality. Most NLG systems in common use employ rules and heuristics and tend to generate rigid and stylised responses without the natural variation of human language. They are also not easily scaled to systems covering multiple domains and languages. This paper presents a statistical language generator based on a semantically controlled Long Short-term Memory (LSTM) structure. The LSTM generator can learn from unaligned data by jointly optimising sentence planning and surface realisation using a simple cross entropy training criterion, and language variation can be easily achieved by sampling from output candidates. With fewer heuristics, an objective evaluation in two differing test domains showed the proposed method improved performance compared to previous methods. Human judges scored the LSTM system higher on informativeness and naturalness and overall preferred it to the other systems.

PDF Abstract EMNLP 2015 PDF EMNLP 2015 Abstract

Datasets


  Add Datasets introduced or used in this paper

Results from the Paper


  Submit results from this paper to get state-of-the-art GitHub badges and help the community compare results to other papers.

Methods