DGPF:A Dialogue Goal Planning Framework for Cognitive Service Conversational Bot

Abstract

With the development of human-machine dialogue technology, more and more companies have launched their cognitive service products, such as Virtual Personal Assistant (VPA), smart speakers, shopping guide robots, etc. However, in these practical applications, most of the bots passively respond to user's utterances, lacking user preference knowledge and the proactive consciousness to lead the dialogue. Therefore, it is essential that bots proactively and naturally lead the dialogue from chitchat to service recommendation to meet user's requirements. To address this challenge, bots not only needs to detect the user's dialogue goal in real time, but also needs to plan a goal sequence based on user profile. In this paper, we propose DGPF, a Dialogue Goal Planning Framework. DGPF plans a reasonable goal sequence grounded on user's interests and personal KB before the conversation, additionally predicts user's true intent (i.e. dialogue goal) and judges whether the goal is completed based on the utterances during the conversation. DGPF includes a novel joint learning model that can simultaneously fix the two sub-tasks of goal completion estimation as well as current goal prediction, and improve each other's performance interactively. Our experimental results on the open dataset DuRecDial have been significantly improved compared to the baseline, which proves the effectiveness of our framework.