Mixed-Session Conversation with Egocentric Memory

Jihyoung Jang, Taeyoung Kim, Hyounghun Kim


Abstract
Recently introduced dialogue systems have demonstrated high usability. However, they still fall short of reflecting real-world conversation scenarios. Current dialogue systems exhibit an inability to replicate the dynamic, continuous, long-term interactions involving multiple partners. This shortfall arises because there have been limited efforts to account for both aspects of real-world dialogues: deeply layered interactions over the long-term dialogue and widely expanded conversation networks involving multiple participants. As the effort to incorporate these aspects combined, we introduce Mixed-Session Conversation, a dialogue system designed to construct conversations with various partners in a multi-session dialogue setup. We propose a new dataset called MiSC to implement this system. The dialogue episodes of MiSC consist of 6 consecutive sessions, with four speakers (one main speaker and three partners) appearing in each episode. Also, we propose a new dialogue model with a novel memory management mechanism, called Egocentric Memory Enhanced Mixed-Session Conversation Agent (EMMA). EMMA collects and retains memories from the main speaker’s perspective during conversations with partners, enabling seamless continuity in subsequent interactions. Extensive human evaluations validate that the dialogues in MiSC demonstrate a seamless conversational flow, even when conversation partners change in each session. EMMA trained with MiSC is also evaluated to maintain high memorability without contradiction throughout the entire conversation.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.689
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
11786–11815
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/Add-Cong-Liu-Florida-Atlantic-University-author-id/2024.findings-emnlp.689/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-emnlp.689
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jihyoung Jang, Taeyoung Kim, and Hyounghun Kim. 2024. Mixed-Session Conversation with Egocentric Memory. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 11786–11815, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Mixed-Session Conversation with Egocentric Memory (Jang et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/Add-Cong-Liu-Florida-Atlantic-University-author-id/2024.findings-emnlp.689.pdf
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