SideControl: Controlled Open-domain Dialogue Generation via Additive Side Networks

Wanyu Du, Yangfeng Ji


Abstract
Transformer-based pre-trained language models boost the performance of open-domain dialogue systems. Prior works leverage Transformer-based pre-trained language models to generate texts with desired attributes in two general approaches: (1) gradient-based methods: updating all latent representations of pre-trained models with gradients from attribute models; (2) weighted-decoding methods: re-ranking beam candidates from pre-trained models with attribute functions. However, gradient-based methods lead to high computation cost and can easily get overfitted on small training sets, while weighted-decoding methods are inherently constrained by the low-variance high-bias pre-trained model. In this work, we propose a novel approach to control the generation of Transformer-based pre-trained language models: the SideControl framework, which leverages a novel control attributes loss to incorporate useful control signals, and is shown to perform well with very limited training samples. We evaluate our proposed method on two benchmark open-domain dialogue datasets, and results show that the SideControl framework has better controllability, higher generation quality and better sample-efficiency than existing gradient-based and weighted-decoding baselines.
Anthology ID:
2021.findings-emnlp.188
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2175–2194
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.188
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.findings-emnlp.188
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Wanyu Du and Yangfeng Ji. 2021. SideControl: Controlled Open-domain Dialogue Generation via Additive Side Networks. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021, pages 2175–2194, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
SideControl: Controlled Open-domain Dialogue Generation via Additive Side Networks (Du & Ji, Findings 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.188.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.188.mp4
Code
 wyu-du/controlled-dialogue-generation
Data
ConvAI2DailyDialog