# PolyResponse: A Rank-based Approach to Task-Oriented Dialogue with Application in Restaurant Search and Booking

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.01296 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01296/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 3 Sep 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [DS-TOD: Efficient Domain Specialization for Task Oriented Dialog](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08395/) (2021)
- [Crossing the Conversational Chasm: A Primer on Natural Language Processing for Multilingual Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08570/) (2021)
- [Multi3WOZ: A Multilingual, Multi-Domain, Multi-Parallel Dataset for Training and Evaluating Culturally Adapted Task-Oriented Dialog Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14031/) (2023)
- [Task-Oriented Dialogue with In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12234/) (2024)
- [GraphWOZ: Dialogue Management with Conversational Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12852/) (2022)
- [A Systematic Study of Performance Disparities in Multilingual Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12892/) (2023)
- [Intent-calibrated Self-training for Answer Selection in Open-domain Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06703/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present PolyResponse, a conversational search engine that supports task-oriented dialogue. It is a retrieval-based approach that bypasses the complex multi-component design of traditional task-oriented dialogue systems and the use of explicit semantics in the form of task-specific ontologies. The PolyResponse engine is trained on hundreds of millions of examples extracted from real conversations: it learns what responses are appropriate in different conversational contexts. It then ranks a large index of text and visual responses according to their similarity to the given context, and narrows down the list of relevant entities during the multi-turn conversation. We introduce a restaurant search and booking system powered by the PolyResponse engine, currently available in 8 different languages.