General-purpose pretrained sentence encoders such as BERT are not ideal for real-world conversational AI applications; they are computationally heavy, slow, and expensive to train. We propose ConveRT (Conversational Representations from Transformers), a faster, more compact dual sentence encoder specifically optimized for dialog tasks. We pretrain using a retrieval-based response selection task, effectively leveraging quantization and subword-level parameterization in the dual encoder to build a lightweight memory- and energy-efficient model. In our evaluation, we show that ConveRT achieves state-of-the-art performance across widely established response selection tasks. We also demonstrate that the use of extended dialog history as context yields further performance gains. Finally, we show that pretrained representations from the proposed encoder can be transferred to the intent classification task, yielding strong results across three diverse data sets. ConveRT trains substantially faster than standard sentence encoders or previous state-of-the-art dual encoders. With its reduced size and superior performance, we believe this model promises wider portability and scalability for Conversational AI applications.

提出了一种名为ConveRT的预训练框架用于对话任务，其采用一种检索式的响应选择任务来预训练轻量级双编码器，能够实现在显著提高性能的同时降低模型大小，进而应用于广泛的对话任务和意图分类任务中。

ConveRT: 基于变形金刚的高效和准确的对话表示