OpenDialKG: Explainable Conversational Reasoning with Attention-based Walks over Knowledge Graphs
Open accessAbstract
We study a conversational reasoning model that strategically traverses through a largescale common fact knowledge graph (KG) to introduce engaging and contextually diverse entities and attributes.For this study, we collect a new Open-ended Dialog ↔ KG parallel corpus called OpenDialKG, where each utterance from 15K human-to-human roleplaying dialogs is manually annotated with ground-truth reference to corresponding entities and paths from a large-scale KG with 1M+ facts.We then propose the DialKG Walker model that learns the symbolic transitions of dialog contexts as structured traversals over KG, and predicts natural entities to introduce given previous dialog contexts via a novel domain-agnostic, attention-based graph path decoder.Automatic and human evaluations show that our model can retrieve more natural and human-like responses than the state-ofthe-art baselines or rule-based models, in both in-domain and cross-domain tasks.The proposed model also generates a KG walk path for each entity retrieved, providing a natural way to explain conversational reasoning.
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Cites
Conversational Recommender System
Sun, Y., & Zhang, Y. (2018) · The 41st International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research & Development in Information Retrieval · doi:10.1145/3209978.3210002 · Cited by 378 · see citing works
Flagged first, then by citations
Research works printed but not linked: 34
- Antoine Bordes, Y-Lan Boureau, and Jason Weston. 2017. Learning end-to-end goal-oriented dialog. ICLR.
- Antoine Bordes, Nicolas Usunier, Alberto Garcia- Duran, Jason Weston, and Oksana Yakhnenko. 2013. Translating embeddings for modeling multi- relational data. In NIPS.
- Andrew Carlson, Justin Betteridge, Bryan Kisiel, Burr Settles, Estevam R Hruschka, and Tom M Mitchell. 2010. Toward an architecture for never-ending lan- guage learning. In AAAI.
- Yun-Nung Chen, William Yang Wang, and Alexan- der Rudnicky. 2015. Jointly modeling inter-slot re- lations by random walk on knowledge graphs for unsupervised spoken language understanding. In NAACL.
- Alexis Conneau, Douwe Kiela, Holger Schwenk, Loïc Barrault, and Antoine Bordes. 2017. Supervised learning of universal sentence representations from natural language inference data. In EMNLP.
- Jeff Dalton. 2018. Vote goat: Conversational movie recommendation. SIGIR.
- Tim Dettmers, Pasquale Minervini, Pontus Stenetorp, and Sebastian Riedel. 2018. Convolutional 2d knowledge graph embeddings. In AAAI.
- John Duchi, Elad Hazan, and Yoram Singer. 2011. Adaptive subgradient methods for online learning and stochastic optimization. JMLR.
- Yaroslav Ganin, Evgeniya Ustinova, Hana Ajakan, Pascal Germain, Hugo Larochelle, Franc ¸ois Lavi- olette, Mario Marchand, and Victor Lempitsky. 2016. Domain-adversarial training of neural net- works. JMLR.
- Marjan Ghazvininejad, Chris Brockett, Ming-Wei Chang, Bill Dolan, Jianfeng Gao, Scott Wen-tau Yih, and Michel Galley. 2018. A knowledge- grounded neural conversation model. In AAAI.
- He He, Anusha Balakrishnan, Mihail Eric, and Percy Liang. 2017. Learning symmetric collaborative di- alogue agents with dynamic knowledge graph em- beddings. ACL.
- Dimitri Kartsaklis, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar, and Nigel Collier. 2018. Mapping text to knowledge graph entities using multi-sense lstms. EMNLP.
- Ni Lao, Tom Mitchell, and William W. Cohen. 2011. Random walk inference and learning in a large scale knowledge base. In EMNLP.
- Jiwei Li, Michel Galley, Chris Brockett, Georgios P Spithourakis, Jianfeng Gao, and Bill Dolan. 2016. A persona-based neural conversation model. ACL.
- Yinong Long, Jianan Wang, Zhen Xu, Zongsheng Wang, Baoxun Wang, and Zhuoran Wang. 2017. A knowledge enhanced generative conversational ser- vice agent. In NIPS DSTC6 Workshop.
- A. H. Miller, W. Feng, A. Fisch, J. Lu, D. Batra, A. Bordes, D. Parikh, and J. Weston. 2017. Parlai: A dialog research software platform. EMNLP.
- Seungwhan Moon and Jaime Carbonell. 2017. Com- pletely heterogeneous transfer learning with atten- tion: What and what not to transfer. IJCAI.
- Seungwhan Moon, Suyoun Kim, and Haohan Wang. 2015. Multimodal transfer deep learning with appli- cations in audio-visual recognition. In NIPS MMML Workshop.
- Seungwhan Moon, Leonard Neves, and Vitor Carvalho. 2018a. Multimodal named entity recognition for short social media posts. NAACL.
- Seungwhan Moon, Leonard Neves, and Vitor Carvalho. 2018b. Zeroshot multimodal named entity disam- biguation for noisy social media posts. ACL.
- Maximilian Nickel, Lorenzo Rosasco, and Tomaso Poggio. 2016. Holographic embeddings of knowl- edge graphs. AAAI.
- Prasanna Parthasarathi and Joelle Pineau. 2018. Ex- tending neural generative conversational model us- ing external knowledge sources. EMNLP.
- Jeffrey Pennington, Richard Socher, and Christo- pher D. Manning. 2014. Glove: Global vectors for word representation. In EMNLP.
- Siva Reddy, Danqi Chen, and Christopher D Manning. 2018. Coqa: A conversational question answering challenge. arXiv preprint arXiv:1808.07042. · arXiv
- Pararth Shah, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Bing Liu, and Gokhan Tur. 2018. Bootstrapping a neural conversa- tional agent with dialogue self-play, crowdsourcing and on-line reinforcement learning. In NAACL.
- Yueming Sun and Yi Zhang. 2018. Conversational rec- ommender system. SIGIR.
- Ilya Sutskever, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc V Le. 2014. Sequence to sequence learning with neural net- works. In NIPS.
- Harm de Vries, Kurt Shuster, Dhruv Batra, Devi Parikh, Jason Weston, and Douwe Kiela. 2018. Talk the walk: Navigating new york city through grounded dialogue. ECCV.
- Zhen Wang, Jianwen Zhang, Jianlin Feng, and Zheng Chen. 2014. Knowledge graph embedding by trans- lating on hyperplanes. In AAAI.
- Wei Wei, Quoc Le, Andrew Dai, and Jia Li. 2018. Airdialogue: An environment for goal-oriented di- alogue research. In EMNLP.
- Jason D Williams, Kavosh Asadi, and Geoffrey Zweig. 2017. Hybrid code networks: practical and efficient end-to-end dialog control with supervised and rein- forcement learning. ACL.
- Zichao Yang, Diyi Yang, Chris Dyer, Xiaodong He, Alex Smola, and Eduard Hovy. 2016. Hierarchical attention networks for document classification. In NAACL.
- Tom Young, Erik Cambria, Iti Chaturvedi, Minlie Huang, Hao Zhou, and Subham Biswas. 2018. Aug- menting end-to-end dialog systems with common- sense knowledge. AAAI.
- Saizheng Zhang, Emily Dinan, Jack Urbanek, Arthur Szlam, Douwe Kiela, and Jason Weston. 2018. Per- sonalizing dialogue agents: I have a dog, do you have pets too? ACL.
Cited by
Sorted by citations
A Survey on Knowledge Graphs: Representation, Acquisition, and Applications
Ji, S., Pan, S., Cambria, E., Marttinen, P., & Yu, P. S. (2022) · IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems · doi:10.1109/tnnls.2021.3070843 · Cited by 2,947 · see citing works
Nauta, M., Trienes, J., Pathak, S., Nguyen, E., Peters, M., Schmitt, Y., Schlötterer, J., van Keulen, M., & Seifert, C. (2023) · ACM Computing Surveys · doi:10.1145/3583558 · Cited by 590 · see citing works
Bang, Y., Cahyawijaya, S., Lee, N., Dai, W., Su, D., Wilie, B., Lovenia, H., Ji, Z., Yu, T., Chung, W., et al. (2023) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2302.04023 · Cited by 337 · see citing works
“To quantitatively measure ChatGPT’s performance on knowledge-grounded dialogue, we utilize 50 samples from the test set of OpenDialKG (Moon et al., 2019), which contains open-ended dialogues grounded on a knowledge path.”
MethodChallenges in building intelligent open-domain dialog systems
Huang, M., Zhu, X., & Gao, J. (2020) · ACM Transactions on Information Systems · doi:10.1145/3383123 · Cited by 288 · see citing works
HaluEval: A Large-Scale Hallucination Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models
Li, J., Cheng, X., Zhao, X., Nie, J.-Y., & Wen, J.-R. (2023) · Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing · doi:10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.397 · Cited by 343 · see citing works
A Survey of Knowledge-enhanced Text Generation
Yu, W., Zhu, C., Li, Z., Hu, Z., Wang, Q., Ji, H., & Jiang, M. (2022) · ACM Computing Surveys · doi:10.1145/3512467 · Cited by 257 · see citing works
On the Origin of Hallucinations in Conversational Models: Is it the Datasets or the Models?
Dziri, N., Milton, S., Yu, M., Zaiane, O., & Reddy, S. (2022) · Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies · doi:10.18653/v1/2022.naacl-main.387 · Cited by 121 · see citing works
Neural Path Hunter: Reducing Hallucination in Dialogue Systems via Path Grounding
Dziri, N., Madotto, A., Zaïane, O., & Bose, A. J. (2021) · Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing · doi:10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.168 · Cited by 81 · see citing works
Open-Domain Conversational Agents: Current Progress, Open Problems, and Future Directions
Roller, S., Boureau, Y.-L., Weston, J., Bordes, A., Dinan, E., Fan, A., Gunning, D., Ju, D., Li, M., Poff, S., et al. (2020) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2006.12442 · Cited by 38 · see citing works
RHO: Reducing Hallucination in Open-domain Dialogues with Knowledge Grounding
Ji, Z., Liu, Z., Lee, N., Yu, T., Wilie, B., Zeng, M., & Fung, P. (2023) · Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 · doi:10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.275 · Cited by 37 · see citing works
Quantifying the uncertainty of LLM hallucination spreading in complex adaptive social networks
Hao, G., Wu, J., Pan, Q., & Morello, R. (2024) · Scientific Reports · doi:10.1038/s41598-024-66708-4 · Cited by 36 · see citing works
MMDialog: A Large-scale Multi-turn Dialogue Dataset Towards Multi-modal Open-domain Conversation
Feng, J., Sun, Q., Xu, C., Zhao, P., Yang, Y., Tao, C., Zhao, D., & Lin, Q. (2023) · Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · doi:10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.405 · Cited by 26 · see citing works
A Survey on LLM-powered Agents for Recommender Systems
Peng, Q., Liu, H., Huang, H., Yang, J., Yang, Q., & Shao, M. (2025) · Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025 · doi:10.18653/v1/2025.findings-emnlp.620 · Cited by 31 · see citing works
Relational memory-augmented language models
Liu, Q., Yogatama, D., & Blunsom, P. (2022) · Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics · doi:10.1162/tacl_a_00476 · Cited by 23 · see citing works
Conversational AI over Military Scenarios Using Intent Detection and Response Generation
Chuang, H.-M., & Cheng, D.-W. (2022) · Applied Sciences · doi:10.3390/app12052494 · Cited by 15 · see citing works
- Authors
- Moon, S., Shah, P., Kumar, A., & Subba, R.
- Venue
- Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
- Published
- 2019
- Pages
- 845-854
- ISSN
- 0736-587X (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2950457956
- Cited by
- 306
- References
- 1
- Citations by year
- 2026: 15 · 2025: 20 · 2024: 26 · 2023: 60 · 2022: 66 · 2021: 62 · 2020: 53 · 2019: 4
- FWCI
- 17.69
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- cc-by
- Locations
- Proceedings of the conference - Association for Computational Linguistics. Meeting (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Speech and dialogue systems
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Topic Modeling
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Natural Language Processing Techniques
- Keywords
- knowledge graphs, explainable reasoning, entity retrieval
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review