Target-Guided Dialogue Response Generation Using Commonsense and Data Augmentation

Prakhar Gupta, Harsh Jhamtani, Jeffrey Bigham


Abstract
Target-guided response generation enables dialogue systems to smoothly transition a conversation from a dialogue context toward a target sentence. Such control is useful for designing dialogue systems that direct a conversation toward specific goals, such as creating non-obtrusive recommendations or introducing new topics in the conversation. In this paper, we introduce a new technique for target-guided response generation, which first finds a bridging path of commonsense knowledge concepts between the source and the target, and then uses the identified bridging path to generate transition responses. Additionally, we propose techniques to re-purpose existing dialogue datasets for target-guided generation. Experiments reveal that the proposed techniques outperform various baselines on this task. Finally, we observe that the existing automated metrics for this task correlate poorly with human judgement ratings. We propose a novel evaluation metric that we demonstrate is more reliable for target-guided response evaluation. Our work generally enables dialogue system designers to exercise more control over the conversations that their systems produce.
Anthology ID:
2022.findings-naacl.97
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022
Month:
July
Year:
2022
Address:
Seattle, United States
Editors:
Marine Carpuat, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Ivan Vladimir Meza Ruiz
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1301–1317
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-naacl.97
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.findings-naacl.97
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Prakhar Gupta, Harsh Jhamtani, and Jeffrey Bigham. 2022. Target-Guided Dialogue Response Generation Using Commonsense and Data Augmentation. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022, pages 1301–1317, Seattle, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Target-Guided Dialogue Response Generation Using Commonsense and Data Augmentation (Gupta et al., Findings 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-naacl.97.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-naacl.97.mp4
Data
ConceptNetDailyDialogOTTers