---
title: "Mem2Seq: Effectively Incorporating Knowledge — Madotto 2018"
description: "Task-oriented dialog systems must ground their replies in external knowledge bases (KBs)."
authors: ["Andrea Madotto", "Chien-Sheng Wu", "Pascale Fung"]
year: 2018
venue: "Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/P18-1136/"
doi: "10.18653/v1/p18-1136"
licence: "CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/madotto-2018-mem2seq-effectively-incorporating-knowledge-bases/"
---
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# Mem2Seq: Effectively Incorporating Knowledge Bases into End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialog Systems

**Authors:** [Andrea Madotto](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/andrea-madotto/), [Chien-Sheng Wu](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/chien-sheng-wu/), [Pascale Fung](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/pascale-fung/) · **Year:** 2018 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/P18-1136/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/P18-1136.pdf) · [DOI 10.18653/v1/p18-1136](https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/p18-1136) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2798779216)

**Citations:** 302 citations (openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14) · [99](#cited-by) in our library, of the 140884 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
Task-oriented dialog systems must ground their replies in external knowledge bases (KBs). Classic pipelines need hand-built modules. RNN encoder-decoders struggle to absorb KB content and are slow on long histories. End-to-end memory networks (MemNN) only pick from fixed candidate responses. The authors propose Mem2Seq, a generative model that adds a sequential decoder to the MemNN framework. A MemNN encoder with multiple hops reads the dialog history and KB tuples. A GRU then issues a fresh query to a decoder-side MemNN at each step. Two distributions are produced: one over the vocabulary and a pointer over memory positions. A sentinel token acts as a hard switch between generating a word and copying one from the history or KB. KB facts are stored as summed (subject, relation, object) embeddings, and only the object is copied. The model was evaluated on bAbI dialog, DSTC2 and In-Car Assistant. It reaches state-of-the-art results on all three, trains faster than RNN baselines, and needs no task-specific engineering. This makes it a simple, general baseline for KB-grounded dialog.

## Key points
- Per the authors, Mem2Seq is the first model to combine MemNN-style multi-hop attention with pointer networks. The first hop spreads attention widely to gather information, and the last hop concentrates sharply to select the exact token.
- Training jointly minimizes two cross-entropy losses, one for the vocabulary distribution and one for the pointer distribution. When the gold word is absent from memory, the pointer target is the sentinel `$`.
- Each history token carries a turn index and a speaker tag (e.g. "hello t1 $u") so the model can capture sequential order.
- Datasets:
  - bAbI dialog: 5 simulated restaurant tasks with 1000 training dialogs each and an extra OOV test set.
  - DSTC2: noisy real human-bot dialogs, split 1618/500/1117.
  - In-Car Assistant: human-human, multi-domain, split 2425/302/304, averaging about 66 KB results per dialog.
- The authors argue entity F1 is a more informative metric than per-response accuracy or BLEU. They still regard BLEU as relevant for task-oriented dialog. Code is at github.com/HLTCHKUST/Mem2Seq.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

Fields: [Natural language processing](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/nlp/)

## Cited by

Cited by

99 papers of our library cite it (of the 140884 whose bibliographies we read); 5 of them have a page here, 94 not yet.

- [Survey of Hallucination in Natural Language Generation](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/ji-2022-survey-hallucination-natural-language-generation/)
- [MoEL: Mixture of Empathetic Listeners](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/lin-2019-moel-mixture-empathetic-listeners/)
- [MinTL: Minimalist Transfer Learning for Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/lin-2020-mintl-minimalist-transfer-learning-task/)
- [UnifiedSKG: Unifying and Multi-Tasking Structured Knowledge Grounding with Text-to-Text Language Models](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/xie-2022-unifiedskg-unifying-multi-tasking-structured/)
- [Knowledge-Enriched Transformer for Emotion Detection in Textual Conversations](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/zhong-2019-knowledge-enriched-transformer-emotion-detection/)

## Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{madotto2018mem2seq,
  title = {{Mem2Seq: Effectively Incorporating Knowledge Bases into End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialog Systems}},
  author = {Madotto, Andrea and Wu, Chien-Sheng and Fung, Pascale},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)},
  year = {2018},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/p18-1136},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/p18-1136}
}
```

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