UniRQR: A Unified Model for Retrieval Decision, Query, and Response Generation in Internet-Based Knowledge Dialogue Systems

Knowledge-based dialogue systems with internet retrieval have recently attracted considerable attention from researchers. The dialogue systems overcome a major limitation of traditional knowledge dialogue systems, where the timeliness of knowledge cannot be assured, hence providing greater practical application value. Knowledge-based dialogue systems with internet retrieval can be typically segmented into three tasks: Retrieval Decision, Query Generation, and Response Generation. However, many of studies assumed that all conversations require external knowledge to continue, neglecting the critical step of determining when retrieval is necessary. This assumption often leads to an over-dependence on external knowledge, even when it may not be required. Our work addresses this oversight by employing a single unified model facilitated by prompt and multi-task learning approaches. This model not only decides whether retrieval is necessary but also generates retrieval queries and responses. By integrating these functions, our system leverages the full potential of pre-trained models and reduces the complexity and costs associated with deploying multiple models. We conducted extensive experiments to investigate the mutual enhancement among the three tasks in our system. What is more, the experiment results on the Wizint and Dusinc datasets not only demonstrate that our unified model surpasses the baseline performance for individual tasks, but also reveal that it achieves comparable results when contrasted with SOTA systems that deploy separate, specialized models for each task.

Dynamically Retrieving Knowledge via Query Generation for informative dialogue response

Knowledge-driven dialogue generation has recently made remarkable breakthroughs. Compared with general dialogue systems, superior knowledge-driven dialogue systems can generate more informative and knowledgeable responses with pre-provided knowledge. However, in practical applications, the dialogue system cannot be provided with corresponding knowledge in advance. In order to solve the problem, we design a knowledge-driven dialogue system named DRKQG (\emph{Dynamically Retrieving Knowledge via Query Generation for informative dialogue response}). Specifically, the system can be divided into two modules: query generation module and dialogue generation module. First, a time-aware mechanism is utilized to capture context information and a query can be generated for retrieving knowledge. Then, we integrate copy Mechanism and Transformers, which allows the response generation module produces responses derived from the context and retrieved knowledge. Experimental results at LIC2022, Language and Intelligence Technology Competition, show that our module outperforms the baseline model by a large margin on automatic evaluation metrics, while human evaluation by Baidu Linguistics team shows that our system achieves impressive results in Factually Correct and Knowledgeable.