Put Chatbot into Its Interlocutor’s Shoes: New Framework to Learn Chatbot Responding with Intention

Hsuan Su, Jiun-Hao Jhan, Fan-yun Sun, Saurav Sahay, Hung-yi Lee


Abstract
Most chatbot literature that focuses on improving the fluency and coherence of a chatbot, is dedicated to making chatbots more human-like. However, very little work delves into what really separates humans from chatbots – humans intrinsically understand the effect their responses have on the interlocutor and often respond with an intention such as proposing an optimistic view to make the interlocutor feel better. This paper proposes an innovative framework to train chatbots to possess human-like intentions. Our framework includes a guiding chatbot and an interlocutor model that plays the role of humans. The guiding chatbot is assigned an intention and learns to induce the interlocutor to reply with responses matching the intention, for example, long responses, joyful responses, responses with specific words, etc. We examined our framework using three experimental setups and evaluated the guiding chatbot with four different metrics to demonstrate flexibility and performance advantages. Additionally, we performed trials with human interlocutors to substantiate the guiding chatbot’s effectiveness in influencing the responses of humans to a certain extent. Code will be made available to the public.
Anthology ID:
2021.naacl-main.123
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Month:
June
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Kristina Toutanova, Anna Rumshisky, Luke Zettlemoyer, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Iz Beltagy, Steven Bethard, Ryan Cotterell, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Yichao Zhou
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1559–1569
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.123
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.123
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hsuan Su, Jiun-Hao Jhan, Fan-yun Sun, Saurav Sahay, and Hung-yi Lee. 2021. Put Chatbot into Its Interlocutor’s Shoes: New Framework to Learn Chatbot Responding with Intention. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 1559–1569, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Put Chatbot into Its Interlocutor’s Shoes: New Framework to Learn Chatbot Responding with Intention (Su et al., NAACL 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.123.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.123.mp4