Unsupervised Enrichment of Persona-grounded Dialog with Background Stories
Bodhisattwa Prasad Majumder, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick, Julian McAuley, Harsh Jhamtani
Abstract
Humans often refer to personal narratives, life experiences, and events to make a conversation more engaging and rich. While persona-grounded dialog models are able to generate responses that follow a given persona, they often miss out on stating detailed experiences or events related to a persona, often leaving conversations shallow and dull. In this work, we equip dialog models with ‘background stories’ related to a persona by leveraging fictional narratives from existing story datasets (e.g. ROCStories). Since current dialog datasets do not contain such narratives as responses, we perform an unsupervised adaptation of a retrieved story for generating a dialog response using a gradient-based rewriting technique. Our proposed method encourages the generated response to be fluent (i.e., highly likely) with the dialog history, minimally different from the retrieved story to preserve event ordering and consistent with the original persona. We demonstrate that our method can generate responses that are more diverse, and are rated more engaging and human-like by human evaluators, compared to outputs from existing dialog models.- Anthology ID:
- 2021.acl-short.74
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)
- Month:
- August
- Year:
- 2021
- Address:
- Online
- Venues:
- ACL | IJCNLP
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 585–592
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-short.74
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2021.acl-short.74
- Cite (ACL):
- Bodhisattwa Prasad Majumder, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick, Julian McAuley, and Harsh Jhamtani. 2021. Unsupervised Enrichment of Persona-grounded Dialog with Background Stories. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 585–592, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Unsupervised Enrichment of Persona-grounded Dialog with Background Stories (Majumder et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nodalida-main-page/2021.acl-short.74.pdf
- Code
- majumderb/pabst