Detecting Speaker Personas from Conversational Texts

Jia-Chen Gu, Zhenhua Ling, Yu Wu, Quan Liu, Zhigang Chen, Xiaodan Zhu


Abstract
Personas are useful for dialogue response prediction. However, the personas used in current studies are pre-defined and hard to obtain before a conversation. To tackle this issue, we study a new task, named Speaker Persona Detection (SPD), which aims to detect speaker personas based on the plain conversational text. In this task, a best-matched persona is searched out from candidates given the conversational text. This is a many-to-many semantic matching task because both contexts and personas in SPD are composed of multiple sentences. The long-term dependency and the dynamic redundancy among these sentences increase the difficulty of this task. We build a dataset for SPD, dubbed as Persona Match on Persona-Chat (PMPC). Furthermore, we evaluate several baseline models and propose utterance-to-profile (U2P) matching networks for this task. The U2P models operate at a fine granularity which treat both contexts and personas as sets of multiple sequences. Then, each sequence pair is scored and an interpretable overall score is obtained for a context-persona pair through aggregation. Evaluation results show that the U2P models outperform their baseline counterparts significantly.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-main.86
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1126–1136
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.86
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.86
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jia-Chen Gu, Zhenhua Ling, Yu Wu, Quan Liu, Zhigang Chen, and Xiaodan Zhu. 2021. Detecting Speaker Personas from Conversational Texts. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 1126–1136, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Detecting Speaker Personas from Conversational Texts (Gu et al., EMNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.86.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.86.mp4
Code
 jasonforjoy/spd
Data
PMPC