Think Before You Speak: Explicitly Generating Implicit Commonsense Knowledge for Response Generation

Pei Zhou, Karthik Gopalakrishnan, Behnam Hedayatnia, Seokhwan Kim, Jay Pujara, Xiang Ren, Yang Liu, Dilek Hakkani-Tur


Abstract
Implicit knowledge, such as common sense, is key to fluid human conversations. Current neural response generation (RG) models are trained to generate responses directly, omitting unstated implicit knowledge. In this paper, we present Think-Before-Speaking (TBS), a generative approach to first externalize implicit commonsense knowledge (think) and use this knowledge to generate responses (speak). We argue that externalizing implicit knowledge allows more efficient learning, produces more informative responses, and enables more explainable models. We analyze different choices to collect knowledge-aligned dialogues, represent implicit knowledge, and transition between knowledge and dialogues. Empirical results show TBS models outperform end-to-end and knowledge-augmented RG baselines on most automatic metrics and generate more informative, specific, and commonsense-following responses, as evaluated by human annotators. TBS also generates knowledge that makes sense and is relevant to the dialogue around 85% of the time
Anthology ID:
2022.acl-long.88
Volume:
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
May
Year:
2022
Address:
Dublin, Ireland
Editors:
Smaranda Muresan, Preslav Nakov, Aline Villavicencio
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1237–1252
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.88
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.88
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Pei Zhou, Karthik Gopalakrishnan, Behnam Hedayatnia, Seokhwan Kim, Jay Pujara, Xiang Ren, Yang Liu, and Dilek Hakkani-Tur. 2022. Think Before You Speak: Explicitly Generating Implicit Commonsense Knowledge for Response Generation. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1237–1252, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Think Before You Speak: Explicitly Generating Implicit Commonsense Knowledge for Response Generation (Zhou et al., ACL 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.88.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.88.mp4
Data
ConceptNetMuTual