Knowledge-aware Multimodal Dialog Systems

Abstract

By offering a natural way for information seeking, multimodal dialogue systems are attracting increasing attention in several domains such as retail, travel etc. However, most existing dialogue systems are limited to textual modality, which cannot be easily extended to capture the rich semantics in visual modality such as product images. For example, in fashion domain, the visual appearance of clothes and matching styles play a crucial role in understanding the user's intention. Without considering these, the dialogue agent may fail to generate desirable responses for users. In this paper, we present a Knowledge-aware Multimodal Dialogue (KMD) model to address the limitation of text-based dialogue systems. It gives special consideration to the semantics and domain knowledge revealed in visual content, and is featured with three key components. First, we build a taxonomy-based learning module to capture the fine-grained semantics in images (e.g., the category and attributes of a product). Second, we propose an end-to-end neural conversational model to generate responses based on the conversation history, visual semantics, and domain knowledge. Lastly, to avoid inconsistent dialogues, we adopt a deep reinforcement learning method which accounts for future rewards to optimize the neural conversational model. We perform extensive evaluation on a multi-turn task-oriented dialogue dataset in fashion domain. Experiment results show that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating the efficacy of modeling visual modality and domain knowledge for dialogue systems. © 2018 Association for Computing Machinery.