Refine and Imitate: Reducing Repetition and Inconsistency in Persuasion Dialogues via Reinforcement Learning and Human Demonstration

Weiyan Shi, Yu Li, Saurav Sahay, Zhou Yu


Abstract
Persuasion dialogue system reflects the machine’s ability to make strategic moves beyond verbal communication, and therefore differentiates itself from task-oriented or open-domain dialogues and has its own unique values. However, the repetition and inconsistency problems still persist in dialogue response generation and could substantially impact user experience and impede the persuasion outcome. Besides, although reinforcement learning (RL) approaches have achieved big success in strategic tasks such as games, it requires a sophisticated user simulator to provide real-time feedback to the dialogue system, which limits the application of RL on persuasion dialogues. To address these issues towards a better persuasion dialogue system, we apply RL to refine a language model baseline without user simulators, and distill sentence-level information about repetition, inconsistency, and task relevance through rewards. Moreover, to better accomplish the persuasion task, the model learns from human demonstration to imitate human persuasion behavior and selects the most persuasive responses. Experiments show that our model outperforms previous state-of-the-art dialogue models on both automatic metrics and human evaluation results on a donation persuasion task, and generates more diverse, consistent and persuasive conversations according to the user feedback. We will make the code and model publicly available.
Anthology ID:
2021.findings-emnlp.295
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:
3478–3492
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.295
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.findings-emnlp.295
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Weiyan Shi, Yu Li, Saurav Sahay, and Zhou Yu. 2021. Refine and Imitate: Reducing Repetition and Inconsistency in Persuasion Dialogues via Reinforcement Learning and Human Demonstration. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021, pages 3478–3492, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Refine and Imitate: Reducing Repetition and Inconsistency in Persuasion Dialogues via Reinforcement Learning and Human Demonstration (Shi et al., Findings 2021)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.295.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.295.mp4