Polite Chatbot: A Text Style Transfer Application

Sourabrata Mukherjee, Vojtěch Hudeček, Ondřej Dušek


Abstract
Generating polite responses is essential to build intelligent and engaging dialogue systems. However, this task is far from well-explored due to the difficulties of rendering a particular style in coherent responses, especially when parallel datasets for regular-to-polite pairs are usually unavailable. This paper proposes a polite chatbot that can produce responses that are polite and coherent to the given context. In this study, a politeness transfer model is first used to generate polite synthetic dialogue pairs of contexts and polite utterances. Then, these synthetic pairs are employed to train a dialogue model. Automatic and human evaluations demonstrate that our method outperforms baselines in producing polite dialogue responses while staying competitive in terms of coherent to the given context.
Anthology ID:
2023.eacl-srw.9
Volume:
Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop
Month:
May
Year:
2023
Address:
Dubrovnik, Croatia
Editors:
Elisa Bassignana, Matthias Lindemann, Alban Petit
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
87–93
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-srw.9
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.eacl-srw.9
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sourabrata Mukherjee, Vojtěch Hudeček, and Ondřej Dušek. 2023. Polite Chatbot: A Text Style Transfer Application. In Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop, pages 87–93, Dubrovnik, Croatia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Polite Chatbot: A Text Style Transfer Application (Mukherjee et al., EACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-srw.9.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-srw.9.mp4