  Neural conversation models are known to generate appropriate but
non-informative responses in general. A scenario where informativeness can be
significantly enhanced is Conversing by Reading (CbR), where conversations take
place with respect to a given external document. In previous work, the external
document is utilized by (1) creating a context-aware document memory that
integrates information from the document and the conversational context, and
then (2) generating responses referring to the memory. In this paper, we
propose to create the document memory with some anticipated responses in mind.
This is achieved using a teacher-student framework. The teacher is given the
external document, the context, and the ground-truth response, and learns how
to build a response-aware document memory from three sources of information.
The student learns to construct a response-anticipated document memory from the
first two sources, and the teacher's insight on memory creation. Empirical
results show that our model outperforms the previous state-of-the-art for the
CbR task.
