Weiqi Zeng, Bo Wang, Dongming Zhao, Zongfeng Qu, Ruifang He, Yuexian Hou, Qinghua Hu. Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025. 2025.

Target-oriented dialog explores how a dialog agent connects two topics cooperatively and coherently, which aims to generate a “bridging” utterance connecting the new topic to the previous conversation turn. The central focus of this task entails multi-hop reasoning on a knowledge graph (KG) to achieve the desired target. However, current target-oriented dialog approaches suffer from inefficiencies in reasoning and the inability to locate pertinent key information without bidirectional reason. To address these limitations, we present a bidirectional reasoning model for target-oriented dialog implemented on a commonsense knowledge graph. Furthermore, we introduce an automated technique for constructing dialog subgraphs, which aids in acquiring multi-hop reasoning capabilities. Our experiments demonstrate that our proposed method attains superior performance in reaching the target while providing more coherent responses.