{"id":883221,"date":"2022-10-05T13:05:01","date_gmt":"2022-10-05T20:05:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/"},"modified":"2025-10-09T19:37:18","modified_gmt":"2025-10-10T02:37:18","slug":"the-whole-truth-and-nothing-but-the-truth-faithful-and-controllable-dialogue-response-generation-with-dataflow-transduction-and-constrained-decoding","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/publication\/the-whole-truth-and-nothing-but-the-truth-faithful-and-controllable-dialogue-response-generation-with-dataflow-transduction-and-constrained-decoding\/","title":{"rendered":"The Whole Truth and Nothing But the Truth: Faithful and Controllable Dialogue Response Generation with Dataflow Transduction and Constrained Decoding"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span dir=\"ltr\" role=\"presentation\">In a real-world dialogue system, generated text <\/span><span dir=\"ltr\" role=\"presentation\">must be truthful and informative while remain<\/span><span dir=\"ltr\" role=\"presentation\">ing fluent and adhering to a prescribed style. <\/span><span dir=\"ltr\" role=\"presentation\">Satisfying these constraints simultaneously is <\/span><span dir=\"ltr\" role=\"presentation\">difficult for the two predominant paradigms in <\/span><span dir=\"ltr\" role=\"presentation\">language generation: neural language model<\/span><span dir=\"ltr\" role=\"presentation\">ing and rule-based generation. We describe a <\/span><span dir=\"ltr\" role=\"presentation\">hybrid architecture for dialogue response gen<\/span><span dir=\"ltr\" role=\"presentation\">eration that combines the strengths of both <\/span><span dir=\"ltr\" role=\"presentation\">paradigms. The first component of this archi<\/span><span dir=\"ltr\" role=\"presentation\">tecture is a rule-based content selection model <\/span><span dir=\"ltr\" role=\"presentation\">defined using a new formal framework called <\/span><span dir=\"ltr\" role=\"presentation\">dataflow transduction<\/span><span dir=\"ltr\" role=\"presentation\">,<\/span> <span dir=\"ltr\" role=\"presentation\">which uses declara<\/span><span dir=\"ltr\" role=\"presentation\">tive rules to transduce a dialogue agent\u2019s ac<\/span><span dir=\"ltr\" role=\"presentation\">tions and their results (represented as dataflow <\/span><span dir=\"ltr\" role=\"presentation\">graphs) into context-free grammars represent<\/span><span dir=\"ltr\" role=\"presentation\">ing the space of contextually acceptable re<\/span><span dir=\"ltr\" role=\"presentation\">sponses.<\/span> <span dir=\"ltr\" role=\"presentation\">The second component is a con<\/span><span dir=\"ltr\" role=\"presentation\">strained decoding procedure that uses these <\/span><span dir=\"ltr\" role=\"presentation\">grammars to constrain the output of a neu<\/span><span dir=\"ltr\" role=\"presentation\">ral language model, which selects fluent utter<\/span><span dir=\"ltr\" role=\"presentation\">ances. Our experiments show that this system <\/span><span dir=\"ltr\" role=\"presentation\">outperforms both rule-based and learned ap<\/span><span dir=\"ltr\" role=\"presentation\">proaches in human evaluations of fluency, rel<\/span><span dir=\"ltr\" role=\"presentation\">evance, and truthfulness.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In a real-world dialogue system, generated text must be truthful and informative while remaining fluent and adhering to a prescribed style. Satisfying these constraints simultaneously is difficult for the two predominant paradigms in language generation: neural language modeling and rule-based generation. We describe a hybrid architecture for dialogue response generation that combines the strengths of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","msr-author-ordering":null,"msr_publishername":"","msr_publisher_other":"","msr_booktitle":"","msr_chapter":"","msr_edition":"","msr_editors":"","msr_how_published":"","msr_isbn":"","msr_issue":"","msr_journal":"","msr_number":"","msr_organization":"","msr_pages_string":"","msr_page_range_start":"","msr_page_range_end":"","msr_series":"","msr_volume":"","msr_copyright":"","msr_conference_name":"Findings of ACL 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