Gaurav Pandey, Danish Contractor, Vineet Kumar, Sachindra Joshi

In this paper we present the Exemplar Encoder-Decoder network (EED), a novel conversation model that learns to utilize \textit{similar} examples from training data to generate responses. Similar conversation examples (context-response pairs) from training data are retrieved using a traditional TF-IDF based retrieval model and the corresponding responses are used by our decoder to generate the ground truth response. The contribution of each retrieved response is weighed by the similarity of corresponding context with the input context. As a result, our model learns to assign higher similarity scores to those retrieved contexts whose responses are crucial for generating the final response. We present detailed experiments on two large data sets and we find that our method out-performs state of the art sequence to sequence generative models on several recently proposed evaluation metrics.