In plain words: A system reads rulebook-style guidelines, pulls out the decision rules, and checks which the conversation already answers, turning the rest into questions for the user. It beat earlier systems and a strong modern baseline on a reading task, while showing what information is still missing.
Abstract · E3: Entailment-driven Extracting and Editing for Conversational Machine Reading
Conversational machine reading systems help users answer high-level questions (e.g. determine if they qualify for particular government benefits) when they do not know the exact rules by which the determination is made(e.g. whether they need certain income levels or veteran status). The key challenge is that these rules are only provided in the form of a procedural text (e.g. guidelines from government website) which the system must read to figure out what to ask the user. We present a new conversational machine reading model that jointly extracts a set of decision rules from the procedural text while reasoning about which are entailed by the conversational history and which still need to be edited to create questions for the user. On the recently introduced ShARC conversational machine reading dataset, our Entailment-driven Extract and Edit network (E3) achieves a new state-of-the-art, outperforming existing systems as well as a new BERT-based baseline. In addition, by explicitly highlighting which information still needs to be gathered, E3 provides a more explainable alternative to prior work. We release source code for our models and experiments at https://github.com/vzhong/e3.
Victor Zhong, Luke Zettlemoyer
arXiv:1906.05373 · cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG · submitted Jun 12, 2019 · updated Feb 13, 2020
abstract · pdf · html · Published at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) 2019. Source code: https://github.com/vzhong/e3. 10 pages, 5 figures