Target-Guided Open-Domain Conversation
Jianheng Tang, Tiancheng Zhao, Chenyan Xiong, Xiaodan Liang, Eric Xing, Zhiting Hu
Abstract
Many real-world open-domain conversation applications have specific goals to achieve during open-ended chats, such as recommendation, psychotherapy, education, etc. We study the problem of imposing conversational goals on open-domain chat agents. In particular, we want a conversational system to chat naturally with human and proactively guide the conversation to a designated target subject. The problem is challenging as no public data is available for learning such a target-guided strategy. We propose a structured approach that introduces coarse-grained keywords to control the intended content of system responses. We then attain smooth conversation transition through turn-level supervised learning, and drive the conversation towards the target with discourse-level constraints. We further derive a keyword-augmented conversation dataset for the study. Quantitative and human evaluations show our system can produce meaningful and effective conversations, significantly improving over other approaches- Anthology ID:
- P19-1565
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2019
- Address:
- Florence, Italy
- Editors:
- Anna Korhonen, David Traum, Lluís Màrquez
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 5624–5634
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/P19-1565
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/P19-1565
- Cite (ACL):
- Jianheng Tang, Tiancheng Zhao, Chenyan Xiong, Xiaodan Liang, Eric Xing, and Zhiting Hu. 2019. Target-Guided Open-Domain Conversation. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 5624–5634, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Target-Guided Open-Domain Conversation (Tang et al., ACL 2019)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/dois-2013-emnlp/P19-1565.pdf
- Code
- squareRoot3/Target-Guided-Conversation + additional community code