@inproceedings{zhao-etal-2017-learning,
    title = "Learning Discourse-level Diversity for Neural Dialog Models using Conditional Variational Autoencoders",
    author = "Zhao, Tiancheng  and
      Zhao, Ran  and
      Eskenazi, Maxine",
    editor = "Barzilay, Regina  and
      Kan, Min-Yen",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2017",
    address = "Vancouver, Canada",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/P17-1061/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/P17-1061",
    pages = "654--664",
    abstract = "While recent neural encoder-decoder models have shown great promise in modeling open-domain conversations, they often generate dull and generic responses. Unlike past work that has focused on diversifying the output of the decoder from word-level to alleviate this problem, we present a novel framework based on conditional variational autoencoders that capture the discourse-level diversity in the encoder. Our model uses latent variables to learn a distribution over potential conversational intents and generates diverse responses using only greedy decoders. We have further developed a novel variant that is integrated with linguistic prior knowledge for better performance. Finally, the training procedure is improved through introducing a bag-of-word loss. Our proposed models have been validated to generate significantly more diverse responses than baseline approaches and exhibit competence of discourse-level decision-making."
}