Learning Retrieval Augmentation for Personalized Dialogue Generation
Qiushi Huang, Shuai Fu, Xubo Liu, Wenwu Wang, Tom Ko, Yu Zhang, Lilian Tang
Abstract
Personalized dialogue generation, focusing on generating highly tailored responses by leveraging persona profiles and dialogue context, has gained significant attention in conversational AI applications. However, persona profiles, a prevalent setting in current personalized dialogue datasets, typically composed of merely four to five sentences, may not offer comprehensive descriptions of the persona about the agent, posing a challenge to generate truly personalized dialogues. To handle this problem, we propose Learning Retrieval Augmentation for Personalized DialOgue Generation (LAPDOG), which studies the potential of leveraging external knowledge for persona dialogue generation. Specifically, the proposed LAPDOG model consists of a story retriever and a dialogue generator. The story retriever uses a given persona profile as queries to retrieve relevant information from the story document, which serves as a supplementary context to augment the persona profile. The dialogue generator utilizes both the dialogue history and the augmented persona profile to generate personalized responses. For optimization, we adopt a joint training framework that collaboratively learns the story retriever and dialogue generator, where the story retriever is optimized towards desired ultimate metrics (e.g., BLEU) to retrieve content for the dialogue generator to generate personalized responses. Experiments conducted on the CONVAI2 dataset with ROCStory as a supplementary data source show that the proposed LAPDOG method substantially outperforms the baselines, indicating the effectiveness of the proposed method. The LAPDOG model code is publicly available for further exploration.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.emnlp-main.154
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
- Month:
- December
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Singapore
- Editors:
- Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
- Venue:
- EMNLP
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 2523–2540
- Language:
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/build-pipeline-with-new-library/2023.emnlp-main.154/
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.154
- Cite (ACL):
- Qiushi Huang, Shuai Fu, Xubo Liu, Wenwu Wang, Tom Ko, Yu Zhang, and Lilian Tang. 2023. Learning Retrieval Augmentation for Personalized Dialogue Generation. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 2523–2540, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Learning Retrieval Augmentation for Personalized Dialogue Generation (Huang et al., EMNLP 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/build-pipeline-with-new-library/2023.emnlp-main.154.pdf