Neural Language Generation for a Turkish Task-Oriented Dialogue System

Rapidly growing language and speech-enabled technologies contribute to the development of task-oriented dialogue systems. The demand for better user engagement has been increasing at an accelerating pace and this brings new remarkable challenges including the generation of informative and natural system utterances. In this work, our ultimate goal is to develop a Turkish task-oriented dialogue system that enables users to navigate over a map in order to get informed about dining venues that best match their preferences and make reservations based on received recommendations. This paper presents the pipeline architecture of our dialogue system with a particular focus on the language generator. We utilize an open source framework for building the components of our system and develop a sequenceto-sequence (Seq2Seq) neural model for language generation. This pioneering work is the first that proposes the use of a neural generation model in a Turkish conversational system. Our evaluations suggest that Turkish neural generation from meaning representations given in the form of dialogue acts is effective, but still in need of further improvements.