@inproceedings{onozeki-inaba-2025-enhancing,
    title = "Enhancing Coherence and Interestingness in Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Generation",
    author = "Onozeki, Hiroki  and
      Inaba, Michimasa",
    editor = "Flek, Lucie  and
      Narayan, Shashi  and
      Phương, L{\^e} Hồng  and
      Pei, Jiahuan",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 18th International Natural Language Generation Conference",
    month = oct,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Hanoi, Vietnam",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/author-page-lei-gao-usc/2025.inlg-main.1/",
    pages = "1--19",
    abstract = "Open-domain dialogue systems have been increasingly applied in various situations, with a growing need to improve user engagement. One effective approach is to generate responses based on interesting external knowledge using knowledge-grounded response generation models. However, relying solely on interestingness can lead to incoherent responses, potentially diminishing user engagement. This paper proposes a novel method for generating engaging responses while maintaining contextual coherence. Our approach leverages a pre-trained knowledge-grounded response generation model and modifies the knowledge selection process to enhance response coherence and interestingness without requiring additional training. First, knowledge candidates with high contextual relevance are retrieved. These candidates are then reranked based on their interestingness and used to generate the responses. Finally, the method detects dialogue breakdowns and regenerates responses as necessary to ensure coherence. We conducted experiments using the Wizard of Wikipedia dataset and two state-of-the-art response generation models. The results indicate that the proposed method improves both response coherence and interestingness."
}