---
title: "OpenDialKG: Explainable Conversational Reasoning — Moon 2019"
description: "Open-domain dialog agents must decide which related entities to bring up next."
authors: ["Seungwhan Moon", "Pararth Shah", "Anuj Kumar", "Rajen Subba"]
year: 2019
venue: "Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/P19-1081/"
doi: "10.18653/v1/p19-1081"
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/moon-2019-opendialkg-explainable-conversational-reasoning-attention/"
---
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# OpenDialKG: Explainable Conversational Reasoning with Attention-based Walks over Knowledge Graphs

**Authors:** Seungwhan Moon, Pararth Shah, [Anuj Kumar](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/anuj-kumar/), [Rajen Subba](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/rajen-subba/) · **Year:** 2019 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/P19-1081/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/P19-1081.pdf) · [DOI 10.18653/v1/p19-1081](https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/p19-1081) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2950457956)

**Citations:** 301 citations (openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14) · [143](#cited-by) in our library, of the 140884 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
Open-domain dialog agents must decide which related entities to bring up next. A large knowledge graph offers far too many factually valid options, and most would feel unnatural in conversation. The authors treat choosing the next entity as learning walks over a KG conditioned on dialog context. They build OpenDialKG, a crowdsourced set of 15K role-play conversations between a user and an assistant. Every entity mention in it is linked to the KG path that connects it to earlier turns. They also propose DialKG Walker. It encodes the current entities, the sentence and the dialog history, then fuses them with modality attention. An autoregressive decoder attends over relations to trace paths from the mentioned entities. Candidates are ranked by combining these path scores with a zeroshot relevance score in KG embedding space. In automatic and human evaluations, the model outperforms state-of-the-art and rule-based baselines both in-domain and cross-domain. Each prediction comes with an explicit walk path, which makes the model's reasoning interpretable.

## Key points
- **OpenDialKG corpus:** about 91K utterances in 15K human-to-human dialogs, collected with ParlAI. It covers scenarios such as chit-chat and recommendations, and each entity mention is manually grounded to a KG path. The authors describe it as the first fully annotated parallel Dialog ↔ KG resource of this kind.
- **Underlying KG:** a common-fact graph with roughly 100K entities and 1.1M facts. Pruning this search space is the central challenge.
- **Input encoding:** entities use KG embeddings (Bordes et al., 2013). Sentences use an attention-based Bi-LSTM with GloVe vectors trained on 6B tokens. Dialog history uses a hierarchical Bi-LSTM with self-attention. The three inputs are combined via modality attention.
- **Graph decoder and training:** the decoder applies relation-level attention at each hop and is supervised with ground-truth walk paths. A hinge rank loss in KG embedding space provides zeroshot scoring for entities unseen in training.
- **Qualitative findings:** the model explores multi-hop relations more often than baselines, which yields more diverse responses. Even when its predicted entity differs from the reference, the predicted relation path is often correct and the entity is still plausible.

*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/)

Topics: [Dialogue systems](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/dialogue-systems/) · [Reasoning](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/reasoning/) · [Knowledge graphs & ontologies](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/knowledge-graphs/)

## Cited by

Cited by

143 papers of our library cite it (of the 140884 whose bibliographies we read); 10 of them have a page here, 133 not yet.

- [A Survey of Large Language Models](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/zhao-2023-survey-large-language-models/)
- [A Multitask, Multilingual, Multimodal Evaluation of ChatGPT on Reasoning, Hallucination, and Interactivity](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/bang-2023-multitask-multilingual-multimodal-evaluation-chatgpt/)
- [HaluEval: A Large-Scale Hallucination Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/li-2023-halueval-large-scale-hallucination-evaluation/)
- [A Survey of the State of Explainable AI for Natural Language Processing](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/danilevsky-2020-survey-state-explainable-ai-natural/)
- [Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Generation with Pre-trained Language Models](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/zhao-2020-knowledge-grounded-dialogue-generation-pre/)
- [On the Origin of Hallucinations in Conversational Models: Is it the Datasets or the Models?](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/dziri-2022-origin-hallucinations-conversational-models-is/)
- [Investigating Pretrained Language Models for Graph-to-Text Generation](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/ribeiro-2021-investigating-pretrained-language-models-graph/)
- [GRICE: A Grammar-based Dataset for Recovering Implicature and Conversational rEasoning](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/zheng-2021-grice-grammar-based-dataset-recovering/)
- [Building Common Ground in Dialogue: A Survey](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/anikina-2025-building-common-ground-dialogue-survey/)
- [K-MIND: Korean Multimodal INteraction Data for Dyadic Conversation Analysis](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/yang-2026-k-mind-korean-multimodal-interaction/)

## Cite

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

```bibtex
@inproceedings{moon2019opendialkg,
  title = {{OpenDialKG: Explainable Conversational Reasoning with Attention-based Walks over Knowledge Graphs}},
  author = {Moon, Seungwhan and Shah, Pararth and Kumar, Anuj and Subba, Rajen},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics},
  year = {2019},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/p19-1081},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/p19-1081}
}
```

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- [↑ back to papers of 2019](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2019/page/2/)

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