@inproceedings{ko-etal-2019-linguistically,
    title = "Linguistically-Informed Specificity and Semantic Plausibility for Dialogue Generation",
    author = "Ko, Wei-Jen  and
      Durrett, Greg  and
      Li, Junyi Jessy",
    editor = "Burstein, Jill  and
      Doran, Christy  and
      Solorio, Thamar",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North {A}merican Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)",
    month = jun,
    year = "2019",
    address = "Minneapolis, Minnesota",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/jlcl-multiple-ingestion/N19-1349/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/N19-1349",
    pages = "3456--3466",
    abstract = "Sequence-to-sequence models for open-domain dialogue generation tend to favor generic, uninformative responses. Past work has focused on word frequency-based approaches to improving specificity, such as penalizing responses with only common words. In this work, we examine whether specificity is solely a frequency-related notion and find that more linguistically-driven specificity measures are better suited to improving response informativeness. However, we find that forcing a sequence-to-sequence model to be more specific can expose a host of other problems in the responses, including flawed discourse and implausible semantics. We rerank our model`s outputs using externally-trained classifiers targeting each of these identified factors. Experiments show that our final model using linguistically motivated specificity and plausibility reranking improves the informativeness, reasonableness, and grammatically of responses."
}