Dialogue system, a method of obtaining a response from a dialogue system, and a method of training a dialogue system

Abstract

A method of obtaining a response to a query inputted by a user, the method comprising: receiving a user inputted query; representing the user inputted query as a sequence of embedding vectors using a first model; encoding the sequence of embedding vectors to produce a context vector using a second model; retrieving responses with associated response vectors; scoring response vectors against the context vector, wherein the scoring is a measure of the similarity between the context vector and a response vector; and outputting the responses with the closest response vectors, wherein the first model is configured to segment a user inputted query into a sequence of units from a vocabulary of units and represent each unit in the sequence as an embedding vector, wherein at least one of the units in the vocabulary is an incomplete word, and wherein the first model comprises parameters that are stored using eight bits per parameter; and wherein the second model has been trained using corresponding queries and responses such that an encoding is used that maximises the similarity between the response vector and context vector for a corresponding query and response.