SimOAP: Improve Coherence and Consistency in Persona-based Dialogue Generation via Over-sampling and Post-evaluation

Junkai Zhou, Liang Pang, Huawei Shen, Xueqi Cheng


Abstract
Language models trained on large-scale corpora can generate remarkably fluent results in open-domain dialogue. However, for the persona-based dialogue generation task, consistency and coherence are also key factors, which are great challenges for language models. Existing works mainly focus on valuable data filtering, model structure modifying, or objective function designing, while their improvements are limited and hard to generalize to all types of pre-trained language models. However, we find that language models can produce consistent and coherent responses if we consider enough generations. Thus, the problems lay in large-scale response generation and target response selection. In this work, a simple but effective two-stage SimOAP strategy is proposed, i.e., over-sampling and post-evaluation. The over-sampling stage takes large-scale responses from existing trained models efficiently via off-the-shelf distilling and compressing methods, and the post-evaluation stage selects a good response based on multiple well-designed evaluation metrics from large-scale candidates. Experimental results show that the proposed plug-in SimOAP strategy improves the backbone models and outperforms the baseline strategies in both automatic and human evaluations.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.553
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9945–9959
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.553
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.553
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Junkai Zhou, Liang Pang, Huawei Shen, and Xueqi Cheng. 2023. SimOAP: Improve Coherence and Consistency in Persona-based Dialogue Generation via Over-sampling and Post-evaluation. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 9945–9959, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
SimOAP: Improve Coherence and Consistency in Persona-based Dialogue Generation via Over-sampling and Post-evaluation (Zhou et al., ACL 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.553.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.553.mp4