UGent-T2K at the 2nd DialDoc Shared Task: A Retrieval-Focused Dialog System Grounded in Multiple Documents

This work presents the contribution from the Text-to-Knowledge team of Ghent University (UGent-T2K) 1 to the MultiDoc2Dial shared task on modeling dialogs grounded in multiple documents. We propose a pipeline system, comprising (1) document retrieval, (2) passage retrieval, and (3) response generation. We engineered these individual components mainly by, for (1)-( We thus significantly boost the baseline system's performance (over +10 points for both F1 and SacreBLEU). Further, error analysis reveals two major failure cases, to be addressed in future work: (i) in case of topic shift within the dialog, retrieval often fails to select the correct grounding document(s), and (ii) generation sometimes fails to use the correctly retrieved grounding passage.