@inproceedings{wang-etal-2017-steering,
    title = "Steering Output Style and Topic in Neural Response Generation",
    author = "Wang, Di  and
      Jojic, Nebojsa  and
      Brockett, Chris  and
      Nyberg, Eric",
    editor = "Palmer, Martha  and
      Hwa, Rebecca  and
      Riedel, Sebastian",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
    month = sep,
    year = "2017",
    address = "Copenhagen, Denmark",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/jlcl-multiple-ingestion/D17-1228/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/D17-1228",
    pages = "2140--2150",
    abstract = "We propose simple and flexible training and decoding methods for influencing output style and topic in neural encoder-decoder based language generation. This capability is desirable in a variety of applications, including conversational systems, where successful agents need to produce language in a specific style and generate responses steered by a human puppeteer or external knowledge. We decompose the neural generation process into empirically easier sub-problems: a faithfulness model and a decoding method based on selective-sampling. We also describe training and sampling algorithms that bias the generation process with a specific language style restriction, or a topic restriction. Human evaluation results show that our proposed methods are able to to restrict style and topic without degrading output quality in conversational tasks."
}