Panoramic-Encoder: A Fast and Accurate Response Selection Paradigm for Generation-Based Dialogue Systems

Response selector is an essential component of generation-based dialogue systems and it aims to pick out an optimal response in a candidate pool to continue the dialogue. The current state-of-the-art methods are mainly based on the encoding paradigm called Cross-Encoder, which separately encodes each context-response pair and ranks the responses according to their fitness scores. However, Cross-Encoder repeatedly encodes the same lengthy context for each response, resulting in high computational costs. Moreover, without considering the relationship among the candidates, it is difficult to figure out which candidate is the best response purely based on the fitness score per candidate. We aim to address these problems through a new paradigm called Panoramic-Encoder. The proposed method encodes all candidates and the context at once and realizes the mutual interaction using a tailored candidate attention mechanism (CAM). It also enables the integration of some effective training techniques, such as the in-batch negative training, which cannot be used in Cross-Encoders. Extensive experiments across four benchmark datasets show that our new method significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art with lower computational complexity.