BoK: Introducing Bag-of-Keywords Loss for Interpretable Dialogue Response Generation

Suvodip Dey, Maunendra Sankar Desarkar


Abstract
The standard language modeling (LM) loss by itself has been shown to be inadequate for effective dialogue modeling. As a result, various training approaches, such as auxiliary loss functions and leveraging human feedback, are being adopted to enrich open-domain dialogue systems. One such auxiliary loss function is Bag-of-Words (BoW) loss, defined as the cross-entropy loss for predicting all the words/tokens of the next utterance. In this work, we propose a novel auxiliary loss named Bag-of-Keywords (BoK) loss to capture the central thought of the response through keyword prediction and leverage it to enhance the generation of meaningful and interpretable responses in open-domain dialogue systems. BoK loss upgrades the BoW loss by predicting only the keywords or critical words/tokens of the next utterance, intending to estimate the core idea rather than the entire response. We incorporate BoK loss in both encoder-decoder (T5) and decoder-only (DialoGPT) architecture and train the models to minimize the weighted sum of BoK and LM (BoK-LM) loss. We perform our experiments on two popular open-domain dialogue datasets, DailyDialog and Persona-Chat. We show that the inclusion of BoK loss improves the dialogue generation of backbone models while also enabling post-hoc interpretability. We also study the effectiveness of BoK-LM loss as a reference-free metric and observe comparable performance to the state-of-the-art metrics on various dialogue evaluation datasets.
Anthology ID:
2024.sigdial-1.48
Volume:
Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
Month:
September
Year:
2024
Address:
Kyoto, Japan
Editors:
Tatsuya Kawahara, Vera Demberg, Stefan Ultes, Koji Inoue, Shikib Mehri, David Howcroft, Kazunori Komatani
Venue:
SIGDIAL
SIG:
SIGDIAL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
566–578
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.sigdial-1.48
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Suvodip Dey and Maunendra Sankar Desarkar. 2024. BoK: Introducing Bag-of-Keywords Loss for Interpretable Dialogue Response Generation. In Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 566–578, Kyoto, Japan. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
BoK: Introducing Bag-of-Keywords Loss for Interpretable Dialogue Response Generation (Dey & Desarkar, SIGDIAL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.sigdial-1.48.pdf