Conversational Entity Dialogue Model

The Conversational Entity Dialogue Model (CEDM) aims at resolving restrictions of conventional single- or multi-domain dialogue models in their capabilities of modelling complex dialogue structures, e.g., relations. The CEDM is a novel dialogue model that is centred around entities and is able to model relations as well as multiple entities of the same type (Ultes et al., 2018). A prototype of the CEDM has been implemented and integrated into the PyDial toolkit.

Please note that the CEDM prototype implementation has been designed in a way to exploit structures and implementations of PyDial where possible. Thus, some restrictions needed to be posed on the implementation which need to be resolved in future versions.

Usage Instructions

The CEDM is disabled by default. To activate and use it, download the latest version of PyDial. From Pydial root, run the activation shell script

python cedm/activation/activate.py

which will copy all necessary files to their respective locations. You will now find a SimulateCEDM.py in the root folder of PyDial which you can use to run experiments with the CEDM. To test it, run

python SimulateCEDM.py -c config/cedm_example.cfg