Jointly Optimizing Diversity and Relevance in Neural Response Generation

Xiang Gao, Sungjin Lee, Yizhe Zhang, Chris Brockett, Michel Galley, Jianfeng Gao, Bill Dolan


Abstract
Although recent neural conversation models have shown great potential, they often generate bland and generic responses. While various approaches have been explored to diversify the output of the conversation model, the improvement often comes at the cost of decreased relevance. In this paper, we propose a SpaceFusion model to jointly optimize diversity and relevance that essentially fuses the latent space of a sequence-to-sequence model and that of an autoencoder model by leveraging novel regularization terms. As a result, our approach induces a latent space in which the distance and direction from the predicted response vector roughly match the relevance and diversity, respectively. This property also lends itself well to an intuitive visualization of the latent space. Both automatic and human evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed approach brings significant improvement compared to strong baselines in both diversity and relevance.
Anthology ID:
N19-1125
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Jill Burstein, Christy Doran, Thamar Solorio
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1229–1238
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1125
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N19-1125
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xiang Gao, Sungjin Lee, Yizhe Zhang, Chris Brockett, Michel Galley, Jianfeng Gao, and Bill Dolan. 2019. Jointly Optimizing Diversity and Relevance in Neural Response Generation. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), pages 1229–1238, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Jointly Optimizing Diversity and Relevance in Neural Response Generation (Gao et al., NAACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1125.pdf
Data
Reddit