Question: What are their baselines?
Evidence: We compared our full method (TextTiling with heuristic-max based on embeddings trained by virtual sentences) with several baselines:
Random. We randomly segmented conversation sessions. In this baseline, we were equipped with the prior probability of segmentation.
MMD. We applied the MinMax-Dotplotting (MMD) approach proposed by Ye et al. BIBREF24 . We ran the executable program provided by the authors.
TextTiling w/ tf INLINEFORM0 idf features. We implemented TextTiling ourselves according to BIBREF12 .
We tuned the hyperparameter INLINEFORM0 in Equation ()on the validation set to make the number of segmentation close to that of manual annotation, and reported precision, recall, and the F-score on the test set in Table TABREF18 . As seen, our approach significantly outperforms baselines by a large margin in terms of both precision and recall. Besides, we can see that MMD obtains low performance, which is mainly because the approach cannot be easily adapted to other datasets like short sentences of conversation utterances. In summary, we achieve an INLINEFORM1 -score higher than baseline methods by more than 20%, showing the effectiveness of enhancing TextTiling with modern word embeddings.
We further conducted in-depth analysis of different strategies of training word-embeddings and matching heuristics in Table TABREF21 . For word embeddings, we trained them on the 3M-sentence dataset with three strategies: (1) virtual-sentence context proposed in our paper; (2) within-sentence context, where all words (except the current one) within a sentence (either a query or reply) are regarded as the context; (3) window-based context, which is the original form of BIBREF25 : the context is the words in a window (previous 2 words and future 2 words in the sentence). We observe that our virtual-sentence strategy consistently outperforms the other two in all three matching heuristics. The results suggest that combining a query and a reply does provide more information in learning dialogue-specific word embeddings.
Regarding matching heuristics, we find that in the second and third strategies of training word embeddings, the complicated heuristic-max method yields higher INLINEFORM0 -scores than simple sum pooling by 2–3%. However, for the virtual-sentence strategy, heuristic-max is slightly worse than the sum pooling. (The degradation is only 0.1% and not significant.) This is probably because both heuristic-max and virtual sentences emphasize the rich interaction between a query and its corresponding reply; combining them does not result in further gain.
We also notice that heuristic-avg is worse than other similarity measures. As this method is mathematically equivalent to the average of word-by-word similarity, it may have an undesirable blurring effect.
To sum up, our experiments show that both the proposed embedding learning approach and the similarity heuristic are effective for session segmentation. The embedding-enhanced TextTiling approach largely outperforms baselines.
We conducted an external experiment to show the effect of session segmentation in dialogue systems. We integrated the segmentation mechanism into a state-of-the-practice retrieval-based system and evaluated the results by manual annotation, similar to our previous work BIBREF27 , BIBREF31 , BIBREF32 .
Concretely, we compared our session segmentation with fixed-length context, used in BIBREF11 . That is to say, the competing method always regards two previous utterances as context. We hired three workers to annotate the results with three integer scores (0–2 points, indicating bad, borderline, and good replies, respectively.) We sampled 30 queries from the test set of 100 sessions. For each query, we retrieved 10 candidates and computed p@1 and nDCG scores BIBREF33 (averaged over three annotators). Provided with previous utterances as context, each worker had up to 1000 sentences to read during annotation.
Table TABREF26 presents the results of the dialogue system with session segmentation. As demonstrated, our method outperforms the simple fixed-context approach in terms of both metrics. We computed the inner-annotator agreement: std INLINEFORM0 0.309; 3-discrete-class Fleiss' kappa score INLINEFORM1 0.411, indicating moderate agreement BIBREF34 .
Case Study. We present a case study on our website: https://sites.google.com/site/sessionsegmentation/. From the case study, we see that the proposed approach is able to segment the dialogue session appropriately, so as to better utilize background information from a conversation session.
In this paper, we addressed the problem of session segmentation for open-domain dialogue systems. We proposed an embedding-enhanced TextTiling approach, where we trained embeddings with the novel notion of virtual sentences; we also proposed several heuristics for similarity measure. Experimental results show that both our embedding learning and similarity measuring are effective in session segmentation, and that with our approach, we can improve the performance of a retrieval-based dialogue system.
We thank anonymous reviewers for useful comments and Jingbo Zhu for sharing the MMD executable program. This paper is partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC Grant Nos. 61272343 and 61472006), the Doctoral Program of Higher Education of China (Grant No. 20130001110032), and the National Basic Research Program (973 Program No. 2014CB340405).
We compared our full method (TextTiling with heuristic-max based on embeddings trained by virtual sentences) with several baselines: • Random. We randomly segmented conversation sessions. In this baseline, we were equipped with the prior probability of segmentation. • MMD. We applied the MinMax-Dotplotting (MMD) approach proposed by Ye et al. [25]. We ran the executable program provided by the authors. • TextTiling. We implemented TextTiling ourselves according to [13].
Answer: Random, MMD, and TextTiling.