Exploiting Persona Information for Diverse Generation of Conversational Responses

Exploiting Persona Information for Diverse Generation of Conversational Responses

Haoyu Song, Wei-Nan Zhang, Yiming Cui, Dong Wang, Ting Liu

Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 5190-5196. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2019/721

In human conversations, due to their personalities in mind, people can easily carry out and maintain the conversations. Giving conversational context with persona information to a chatbot, how to exploit the information to generate diverse and sustainable conversations is still a non-trivial task. Previous work on persona-based conversational models successfully make use of predefined persona information and have shown great promise in delivering more realistic responses. And they all learn with the assumption that given a source input, there is only one target response. However, in human conversations, there are massive appropriate responses to a given input message. In this paper, we propose a memory-augmented architecture to exploit persona information from context and incorporate a conditional variational autoencoder model together to generate diverse and sustainable conversations. We evaluate the proposed model on a benchmark persona-chat dataset. Both automatic and human evaluations show that our model can deliver more diverse and more engaging persona-based responses than baseline approaches.
Keywords:
Natural Language Processing: Dialogue
Natural Language Processing: Natural Language Generation
Humans and AI: Personalization and User Modeling