Disentangling language and knowledge in task-oriented dialogs

The Knowledge Base (KB) used for real-world applications, such as booking a movie or restaurant reservation, keeps changing over time. End-to-end neural networks trained for these task-oriented dialogs are expected to be immune to any changes in the KB. However, existing approaches breakdown when asked to handle such changes. We propose an encoder-decoder architecture (BOSSNET) with a novel Bag-of-Sequences (BOSS) memory, which facilitates the disentangled learning of the response's language model and its knowledge incorporation. Consequently, the KB can be modified with new knowledge without a drop in interpretability. We find that BOSSNET outperforms state-of-the-art models, with considerable improvements (>10%) on bAbI OOV test sets and other human-human datasets. We also systematically modify existing datasets to measure disentanglement and show BOSSNET to be robust to KB modifications.