James Kennedy


2019

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Affect-Driven Dialog Generation
Pierre Colombo | Wojciech Witon | Ashutosh Modi | James Kennedy | Mubbasir Kapadia
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)

The majority of current systems for end-to-end dialog generation focus on response quality without an explicit control over the affective content of the responses. In this paper, we present an affect-driven dialog system, which generates emotional responses in a controlled manner using a continuous representation of emotions. The system achieves this by modeling emotions at a word and sequence level using: (1) a vector representation of the desired emotion, (2) an affect regularizer, which penalizes neutral words, and (3) an affect sampling method, which forces the neural network to generate diverse words that are emotionally relevant. During inference, we use a re-ranking procedure that aims to extract the most emotionally relevant responses using a human-in-the-loop optimization process. We study the performance of our system in terms of both quantitative (BLEU score and response diversity), and qualitative (emotional appropriateness) measures.