Deep Contextualized Utterance Representations for Response Selection and Dialogue Analysis

The NOESIS II challenge, as the Track 2 in the Eighth Dialogue System Technology Challenge (DSTC 8), is the extension of Track 1 in DSTC 7. Three new elements are incorporated into the extended track, i.e., dialogue with multiple participants, dialogue success, and dialogue disentanglement. These are vital for the creation of a deployed task-oriented dialogue system. This track is divided into four subtasks, the first two of which are evaluated in the form of response selection and the last two focus on dialogue analysis. This paper describes our methods developed for these four subtasks, which all employ deep contextualized utterance representations to make models aware of contextual information and to keep the intrinsic property of multi-turn dialogue systems. In the released evaluation results of Track 2 in DSTC 8, our proposed methods ranked fourth in subtask 1, third in subtask 2, and first in subtask 3 and subtask 4 respectively. In addition to the challenge tasks, we also compare our proposed methods with previous ones on public benchmark datasets. Experimental results show that our proposed methods outperform existing ones by large margins and achieve new state-of-the-art performances on multi-turn response selection and dialogue disentanglement.