Sequential Dialogue Context Modeling for Spoken Language Understanding

Ankur Bapna, Gokhan Tur, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Larry Heck
2017 Proceedings of the 18th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue  
Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) is a key component of goal oriented dialogue systems that would parse user utterances into semantic frame representations. Traditionally SLU does not utilize the dialogue history beyond the previous system turn and contextual ambiguities are resolved by the downstream components. In this paper, we explore novel approaches for modeling dialogue context in a recurrent neural network (RNN) based language understanding system. We propose the Sequential Dialogue
more » ... coder Network, that allows encoding context from the dialogue history in chronological order. We compare the performance of our proposed architecture with two context models, one that uses just the previous turn context and another that encodes dialogue context in a memory network, but loses the order of utterances in the dialogue history. Experiments with a multi-domain dialogue dataset demonstrate that the proposed architecture results in reduced semantic frame error rates.
doi:10.18653/v1/w17-5514 dblp:conf/sigdial/BapnaTHH17 fatcat:2chlvuq555dibntumqgwn534qa