Target-Guided Open-Domain Conversation

Jianheng Tang, Tiancheng Zhao, Chenyan Xiong, Xiaodan Liang, Eric Xing, Zhiting Hu


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
Anthology ID:
P19-1565
Volume:
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Editors:
Anna Korhonen, David Traum, Lluís Màrquez
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5624–5634
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1565
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P19-1565
Bibkey:
Cite (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.
Cite (Informal):
Target-Guided Open-Domain Conversation (Tang et al., ACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1565.pdf
Supplementary:
 P19-1565.Supplementary.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/P19-1565.mp4
Code
 squareRoot3/Target-Guided-Conversation +  additional community code