In this paper, we propose an interactive matching network (IMN) to enhance the representations of contexts and responses at both the word level and sentence level for the multi-turn response selection task. First, IMN constructs word representations from three aspects to address the challenge of out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words. Second, an attentive hierarchical recurrent encoder (AHRE), which is capable of encoding sentences hierarchically and generating more descriptive representations by aggregating with an attention mechanism, is designed. Finally, the bidirectional interactions between whole multi-turn contexts and response candidates are calculated to derive the matching information between them. Experiments on four public datasets show that IMN significantly outperforms the baseline models by large margins on all metrics, achieving new state-of-the-art performance and demonstrating compatibility across domains for multi-turn response selection.
@cite_30: We investigate the task of building open domain, conversational dialogue systems based on large dialogue corpora using generative models. Generative models produce system responses that are autonomously generated word-by-word, opening up the possibility for realistic, flexible interactions. In support of this goal, we extend the recently proposed hierarchical recurrent encoder-decoder neural network to the dialogue domain, and demonstrate that this model is competitive with state-of-the-art neural language models and backoff n-gram models. We investigate the limitations of this and similar approaches, and show how its performance can be improved by bootstrapping the learning from a larger question-answer pair corpus and from pretrained word embeddings.
@cite_35: This paper presents results of our experiments for the next utterance ranking on the Ubuntu Dialog Corpus -- the largest publicly available multi-turn dialog corpus. First, we use an in-house implementation of previously reported models to do an independent evaluation using the same data. Second, we evaluate the performances of various LSTMs, Bi-LSTMs and CNNs on the dataset. Third, we create an ensemble by averaging predictions of multiple models. The ensemble further improves the performance and it achieves a state-of-the-art result for the next utterance ranking on this dataset. Finally, we discuss our future plans using this corpus.
@cite_4: This paper introduces the Ubuntu Dialogue Corpus, a dataset containing almost 1 million multi-turn dialogues, with a total of over 7 million utterances and 100 million words. This provides a unique resource for research into building dialogue managers based on neural language models that can make use of large amounts of unlabeled data. The dataset has both the multi-turn property of conversations in the Dialog State Tracking Challenge datasets, and the unstructured nature of interactions from microblog services such as Twitter. We also describe two neural learning architectures suitable for analyzing this dataset, and provide benchmark performance on the task of selecting the best next response.
@cite_36: In this paper, we construct and train end-to-end neural network-based dialogue systems using an updated version of the recent Ubuntu Dialogue Corpus, a dataset containing almost 1 million multi-turn dialogues, with a total of over 7 million utterances and 100 million words. This dataset is interesting because of its size, long context lengths, and technical nature; thus, it can be used to train large models directly from data with minimal feature engineering, which can be both time consuming and expensive. We provide baselines in two different environments: one where models are trained to maximize the log-likelihood of a generated utterance conditioned on the context of the conversation, and one where models are trained to select the correct next response from a list of candidate responses. These are both evaluated on a recall task that we call Next Utterance Classification (NUC), as well as other generation-specific metrics. Finally, we provide a qualitative error analysis to help determine the most promising directions for future research on the Ubuntu Dialogue Corpus, and for end-to-end dialogue systems in general.
@cite_21: 
@cite_3: We propose Neural Responding Machine (NRM), a neural network-based response generator for Short-Text Conversation. NRM takes the general encoderdecoder framework: it formalizes the generation of response as a decoding process based on the latent representation of the input text, while both encoding and decoding are realized with recurrent neural networks (RNN). The NRM is trained with a large amount of one-round conversation data collected from a microblogging service. Empirical study shows that NRM can generate grammatically correct and content-wise appropriate responses to over 75 of the input text, outperforming stateof-the-arts in the same setting, including retrieval-based and SMT-based models.
@cite_31: 
@cite_17: 
Chatbots aim to engage users in human-computer conversations in the open domain and are currently receiving increasing attention because they can target unstructured dialogue without a priori logical representation of the information exchanged during the conversation. Existing work on building chatbots includes generation-based methods @cite_3 @cite_30 and retrieval-based methods @cite_4 @cite_35 @cite_36 @cite_17 @cite_31 @cite_21 . Generation-based models maximize the probability of generating a response given the previous dialogue. This approach enables the incorporation of rich context when mapping between consecutive dialogue turns. Retrieval-based chatbots have the advantage of informative and fluent responses because they select a proper response for the current conversation from a repository by means of response selection algorithms.