Building a socially intelligent agent involves many challenges. One of which is to track the agent’s mental state transition and teach the agent to make decisions guided by its value like a human. Towards this end, we propose to incorporate mental state simulation and value modeling into dialogue agents. First, we build a hybrid mental state parser that extracts information from both the dialogue and event observations and maintains a graphical representation of the agent’s mind; Meanwhile, the transformer-based value model learns human preferences from the human value dataset, ValueNet. Empirical results show that the proposed model attains state-of-the-art performance on the dialogue/action/emotion prediction task in the fantasy text-adventure game dataset, LIGHT. We also show example cases to demonstrate: (i) how the proposed mental state parser can assist the agent’s decision by grounding on the context like locations and objects, and (ii) how the value model can help the agent make decisions based on its personal priorities.

Inferring social relations from dialogues is vital for building emotionally intelligent robots to interpret human language better and act accordingly. We model the social network as an And-or Graph, named SocAoG, for the consistency of relations among a group and leveraging attributes as inference cues. Moreover, we formulate a sequential structure prediction task, and propose an 𝛼-𝛽-𝛾 strategy to incrementally parse SocAoG for the dynamic inference upon any incoming utterance: (i) an 𝛼 process predicting attributes and relations conditioned on the semantics of dialogues, (ii) a 𝛽 process updating the social relations based on related attributes, and (iii) a 𝛾 process updating individual’s attributes based on interpersonal social relations. Empirical results on DialogRE and MovieGraph show that our model infers social relations more accurately than the state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, the ablation study shows the three processes complement each other, and the case study demonstrates the dynamic relational inference.

Inducing a meaningful structural representation from one or a set of dialogues is a crucial but challenging task in computational linguistics. Advancement made in this area is critical for dialogue system design and discourse analysis. It can also be extended to solve grammatical inference. In this work, we propose to incorporate structured attention layers into a Variational Recurrent Neural Network (VRNN) model with discrete latent states to learn dialogue structure in an unsupervised fashion. Compared to a vanilla VRNN, structured attention enables a model to focus on different parts of the source sentence embeddings while enforcing a structural inductive bias. Experiments show that on two-party dialogue datasets, VRNN with structured attention learns semantic structures that are similar to templates used to generate this dialogue corpus. While on multi-party dialogue datasets, our model learns an interactive structure demonstrating its capability of distinguishing speakers or addresses, automatically disentangling dialogues without explicit human annotation.