Enhancing Dialogue Systems with Discourse-Level Understanding Using Deep Canonical Correlation Analysis

The evolution of conversational agents has been driven by the need for more contextually aware systems that can effectively manage dialogue over extended interactions. To address the limitations of existing models in capturing and utilizing long-term conversational history, we propose a novel framework that integrates Deep Canonical Correlation Analysis (DCCA) for discourse-level understanding. This framework learns discourse tokens to capture relationships between utterances and their surrounding context, enabling a better understanding of long-term dependencies. Experiments on the Ubuntu Dialogue Corpus demonstrate significant enhancement in response selection, based on the improved automatic evaluation metric scores. The results highlight the potential of DCCA in improving dialogue systems by allowing them to filter out irrelevant context and retain critical discourse information for more accurate response retrieval.

A Multi-view Discourse Framework for Integrating Semantic and Syntactic Features in Dialog Agents

Multiturn dialogue models aim to generate human-like responses by leveraging conversational context, consisting of utterances from previous exchanges. Existing methods often neglect the interactions between these utterances or treat all of them as equally significant. This paper introduces a discourse-aware framework for response selection in retrieval-based dialogue systems. The proposed model first encodes each utterance and response with contextual, positional, and syntactic features using Multi-view Canonical Correlation Analysis (MCCA). It then learns discourse tokens that capture relationships between an utterance and its surrounding turns in a shared subspace via Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA). This two-step approach effectively integrates semantic and syntactic features to build discourse-level understanding. Experiments on the Ubuntu Dialogue Corpus demonstrate that our model achieves significant improvements in automatic evaluation metrics, highlighting its effectiveness in response selection.

Suitability of CCA for Generating Latent State/ Variables in Multi-View Textual Data

The probabilistic interpretation of Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) for learning low-dimensional real vectors, called as latent variables, has been exploited immensely in various fields. This study takes a step further by demonstrating the potential of CCA in discovering a latent state that captures the contextual information within the textual data under a two-view setting. The interpretation of CCA discussed in this study utilizes the multi-view nature of textual data, i.e. the consecutive sentences in a document or turns in a dyadic conversation, and has a strong theoretical foundation. Furthermore, this study proposes a model using CCA to perform the Automatic Short Answer Grading (ASAG) task. The empirical analysis confirms that the proposed model delivers competitive results and can even beat various sophisticated supervised techniques. The model is simple, linear, and adaptable and should be used as the baseline especially when labeled training data is scarce or nonexistent.