We Are What We Repeatedly Do: Inducing and Deploying Habitual Schemas in Persona-Based Responses

Benjamin Kane, Lenhart Schubert


Abstract
Many practical applications of dialogue technology require the generation of responses according to a particular developer-specified persona. While a variety of personas can be elicited from recent large language models, the opaqueness and unpredictability of these models make it desirable to be able to specify personas in an explicit form. In previous work, personas have typically been represented as sets of one-off pieces of self-knowledge that are retrieved by the dialogue system for use in generation. However, in realistic human conversations, personas are often revealed through story-like narratives that involve rich habitual knowledge – knowledge about kinds of events that an agent often participates in (e.g., work activities, hobbies, sporting activities, favorite entertainments, etc.), including typical goals, sub-events, preconditions, and postconditions of those events. We capture such habitual knowledge using an explicit schema representation, and propose an approach to dialogue generation that retrieves relevant schemas to condition a large language model to generate persona-based responses. Furthermore, we demonstrate a method for bootstrapping the creation of such schemas by first generating generic passages from a set of simple facts, and then inducing schemas from the generated passages.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.678
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
10998–11016
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.678
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.678
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Benjamin Kane and Lenhart Schubert. 2023. We Are What We Repeatedly Do: Inducing and Deploying Habitual Schemas in Persona-Based Responses. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 10998–11016, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
We Are What We Repeatedly Do: Inducing and Deploying Habitual Schemas in Persona-Based Responses (Kane & Schubert, EMNLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.678.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.678.mp4