Improving Multi-party Dialogue Generation via Topic and Rhetorical Coherence

Yaxin Fan, Peifeng Li, Qiaoming Zhu


Abstract
Previous studies on multi-party dialogue generation predominantly concentrated on modeling the reply-to structure of dialogue histories, always overlooking the coherence between generated responses and target utterances. To address this issue, we propose a Reinforcement Learning approach emphasizing both Topic and Rhetorical Coherence (RL-TRC). In particular, the topic- and rhetorical-coherence tasks are designed to enhance the model’s perception of coherence with the target utterance. Subsequently, an agent is employed to learn a coherence policy, which guides the generation of responses that are topically and rhetorically aligned with the target utterance. Furthermore, three discourse-aware rewards are developed to assess the coherence between the generated response and the target utterance, with the objective of optimizing the policy. The experimental results and in-depth analyses on two popular datasets demonstrate that our RL-TRC significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines, particularly in generating responses that are more coherent with the target utterances.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.189
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3240–3253
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.189
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Yaxin Fan, Peifeng Li, and Qiaoming Zhu. 2024. Improving Multi-party Dialogue Generation via Topic and Rhetorical Coherence. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 3240–3253, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Improving Multi-party Dialogue Generation via Topic and Rhetorical Coherence (Fan et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.189.pdf