TAKE: Topic-shift Aware Knowledge sElection for Dialogue Generation

AbstractKnowledge-grounded dialogue generation consists of two subtasks: knowledge selection and response generation. The knowledge selector generally constructs a query based on the dialogue context and selects the most appropriate knowledge to help response generation. Recent work finds that realizing who (the user or the agent) holds the initiative and utilizing the role-initiative information to instruct the query construction can help select knowledge. It depends on whether the knowledge connection between two adjacent rounds is smooth to assign the role. However, whereby the user takes the initiative only when there is a strong semantic transition between two rounds, probably leading to initiative misjudgment. Therefore, it is necessary to seek a more sensitive reason beyond the initiative role for knowledge selection. To address the above problem, we propose a Topic-shift Aware Knowledge sElector(TAKE). Specifically, we first annotate the topic shift and topic inheritance labels in multi-round dialogues with distant supervision. Then, we alleviate the noise problem in pseudo labels through curriculum learning and knowledge distillation. Extensive experiments on WoW show that TAKE performs better than strong baselines.