@inproceedings{tang-etal-2019-target,
title = "Target-Guided Open-Domain Conversation",
author = "Tang, Jianheng and
Zhao, Tiancheng and
Xiong, Chenyan and
Liang, Xiaodan and
Xing, Eric and
Hu, Zhiting",
editor = "Korhonen, Anna and
Traum, David and
M{\`a}rquez, Llu{\'i}s",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics",
month = jul,
year = "2019",
address = "Florence, Italy",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/P19-1565/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/P19-1565",
pages = "5624--5634",
abstract = "Many real-world open-domain conversation applications have specific goals to achieve during open-ended chats, such as recommendation, psychotherapy, education, etc. We study the problem of imposing conversational goals on open-domain chat agents. In particular, we want a conversational system to chat naturally with human and proactively guide the conversation to a designated target subject. The problem is challenging as no public data is available for learning such a target-guided strategy. We propose a structured approach that introduces coarse-grained keywords to control the intended content of system responses. We then attain smooth conversation transition through turn-level supervised learning, and drive the conversation towards the target with discourse-level constraints. We further derive a keyword-augmented conversation dataset for the study. Quantitative and human evaluations show our system can produce meaningful and effective conversations, significantly improving over other approaches"
}<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<modsCollection xmlns="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3">
<mods ID="tang-etal-2019-target">
<titleInfo>
<title>Target-Guided Open-Domain Conversation</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Jianheng</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Tang</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Tiancheng</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Zhao</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Chenyan</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Xiong</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Xiaodan</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Liang</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Eric</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Xing</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Zhiting</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Hu</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<dateIssued>2019-07</dateIssued>
</originInfo>
<typeOfResource>text</typeOfResource>
<relatedItem type="host">
<titleInfo>
<title>Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Anna</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Korhonen</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">David</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Traum</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Lluís</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Màrquez</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<publisher>Association for Computational Linguistics</publisher>
<place>
<placeTerm type="text">Florence, Italy</placeTerm>
</place>
</originInfo>
<genre authority="marcgt">conference publication</genre>
</relatedItem>
<abstract>Many real-world open-domain conversation applications have specific goals to achieve during open-ended chats, such as recommendation, psychotherapy, education, etc. We study the problem of imposing conversational goals on open-domain chat agents. In particular, we want a conversational system to chat naturally with human and proactively guide the conversation to a designated target subject. The problem is challenging as no public data is available for learning such a target-guided strategy. We propose a structured approach that introduces coarse-grained keywords to control the intended content of system responses. We then attain smooth conversation transition through turn-level supervised learning, and drive the conversation towards the target with discourse-level constraints. We further derive a keyword-augmented conversation dataset for the study. Quantitative and human evaluations show our system can produce meaningful and effective conversations, significantly improving over other approaches</abstract>
<identifier type="citekey">tang-etal-2019-target</identifier>
<identifier type="doi">10.18653/v1/P19-1565</identifier>
<location>
<url>https://aclanthology.org/P19-1565/</url>
</location>
<part>
<date>2019-07</date>
<extent unit="page">
<start>5624</start>
<end>5634</end>
</extent>
</part>
</mods>
</modsCollection>
%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Target-Guided Open-Domain Conversation
%A Tang, Jianheng
%A Zhao, Tiancheng
%A Xiong, Chenyan
%A Liang, Xiaodan
%A Xing, Eric
%A Hu, Zhiting
%Y Korhonen, Anna
%Y Traum, David
%Y Màrquez, Lluís
%S Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
%D 2019
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Florence, Italy
%F tang-etal-2019-target
%X Many real-world open-domain conversation applications have specific goals to achieve during open-ended chats, such as recommendation, psychotherapy, education, etc. We study the problem of imposing conversational goals on open-domain chat agents. In particular, we want a conversational system to chat naturally with human and proactively guide the conversation to a designated target subject. The problem is challenging as no public data is available for learning such a target-guided strategy. We propose a structured approach that introduces coarse-grained keywords to control the intended content of system responses. We then attain smooth conversation transition through turn-level supervised learning, and drive the conversation towards the target with discourse-level constraints. We further derive a keyword-augmented conversation dataset for the study. Quantitative and human evaluations show our system can produce meaningful and effective conversations, significantly improving over other approaches
%R 10.18653/v1/P19-1565
%U https://aclanthology.org/P19-1565/
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/P19-1565
%P 5624-5634
Markdown (Informal)
[Target-Guided Open-Domain Conversation](https://aclanthology.org/P19-1565/) (Tang et al., ACL 2019)
ACL
- Jianheng Tang, Tiancheng Zhao, Chenyan Xiong, Xiaodan Liang, Eric Xing, and Zhiting Hu. 2019. Target-Guided Open-Domain Conversation. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 5624–5634, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.