Keep Me Updated! Memory Management in Long-term Conversations

Sanghwan Bae, Donghyun Kwak, Soyoung Kang, Min Young Lee, Sungdong Kim, Yuin Jeong, Hyeri Kim, Sang-Woo Lee, Woomyoung Park, Nako Sung


Abstract
Remembering important information from the past and continuing to talk about it in the present are crucial in long-term conversations. However, previous literature does not deal with cases where the memorized information is outdated, which may cause confusion in later conversations. To address this issue, we present a novel task and a corresponding dataset of memory management in long-term conversations, in which bots keep track of and bring up the latest information about users while conversing through multiple sessions. In order to support more precise and interpretable memory, we represent memory as unstructured text descriptions of key information and propose a new mechanism of memory management that selectively eliminates invalidated or redundant information. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms the baselines that leave the stored memory unchanged in terms of engagingness and humanness, with larger performance gap especially in the later sessions.
Anthology ID:
2022.findings-emnlp.276
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Editors:
Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3769–3787
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-emnlp.276
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.findings-emnlp.276
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sanghwan Bae, Donghyun Kwak, Soyoung Kang, Min Young Lee, Sungdong Kim, Yuin Jeong, Hyeri Kim, Sang-Woo Lee, Woomyoung Park, and Nako Sung. 2022. Keep Me Updated! Memory Management in Long-term Conversations. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022, pages 3769–3787, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Keep Me Updated! Memory Management in Long-term Conversations (Bae et al., Findings 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-emnlp.276.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-emnlp.276.mp4