Enhancing Dialog Coherence with Event Graph Grounded Content Planning

Enhancing Dialog Coherence with Event Graph Grounded Content Planning

Jun Xu, Zeyang Lei, Haifeng Wang, Zheng-Yu Niu, Hua Wu, Wanxiang Che

Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 3941-3947. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2020/545

How to generate informative, coherent and sustainable open-domain conversations is a non-trivial task. Previous work on knowledge grounded conversation generation focus on improving dialog informativeness with little attention on dialog coherence. In this paper, to enhance multi-turn dialog coherence, we propose to leverage event chains to help determine a sketch of a multi-turn dialog. We first extract event chains from narrative texts and connect them as a graph. We then present a novel event graph grounded Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework. It conducts high-level response content (simply an event) planning by learning to walk over the graph, and then produces a response conditioned on the planned content. In particular, we devise a novel multi-policy decision making mechanism to foster a coherent dialog with both appropriate content ordering and high contextual relevance. Experimental results indicate the effectiveness of this framework in terms of dialog coherence and informativeness.
Keywords:
Natural Language Processing: Dialogue