Like hiking? You probably enjoy nature: Persona-grounded Dialog with Commonsense Expansions

Bodhisattwa Prasad Majumder, Harsh Jhamtani, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick, Julian McAuley


Abstract
Existing persona-grounded dialog models often fail to capture simple implications of given persona descriptions, something which humans are able to do seamlessly. For example, state-of-the-art models cannot infer that interest in hiking might imply love for nature or longing for a break. In this paper, we propose to expand available persona sentences using existing commonsense knowledge bases and paraphrasing resources to imbue dialog models with access to an expanded and richer set of persona descriptions. Additionally, we introduce fine-grained grounding on personas by encouraging the model to make a discrete choice among persona sentences while synthesizing a dialog response. Since such a choice is not observed in the data, we model it using a discrete latent random variable and use variational learning to sample from hundreds of persona expansions. Our model outperforms competitive baselines on the Persona-Chat dataset in terms of dialog quality and diversity while achieving persona-consistent and controllable dialog generation.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.739
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Bonnie Webber, Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9194–9206
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.739
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.739
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Bodhisattwa Prasad Majumder, Harsh Jhamtani, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick, and Julian McAuley. 2020. Like hiking? You probably enjoy nature: Persona-grounded Dialog with Commonsense Expansions. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 9194–9206, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Like hiking? You probably enjoy nature: Persona-grounded Dialog with Commonsense Expansions (Majumder et al., EMNLP 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.739.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38938989
Code
 majumderb/compac
Data
ConvAI2