Improving Neural Conversational Models with Entropy-Based Data Filtering

Richárd Csáky, Patrik Purgai, Gábor Recski


Abstract
Current neural network-based conversational models lack diversity and generate boring responses to open-ended utterances. Priors such as persona, emotion, or topic provide additional information to dialog models to aid response generation, but annotating a dataset with priors is expensive and such annotations are rarely available. While previous methods for improving the quality of open-domain response generation focused on either the underlying model or the training objective, we present a method of filtering dialog datasets by removing generic utterances from training data using a simple entropy-based approach that does not require human supervision. We conduct extensive experiments with different variations of our method, and compare dialog models across 17 evaluation metrics to show that training on datasets filtered this way results in better conversational quality as chatbots learn to output more diverse responses.
Anthology ID:
P19-1567
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:
5650–5669
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1567
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P19-1567
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Richárd Csáky, Patrik Purgai, and Gábor Recski. 2019. Improving Neural Conversational Models with Entropy-Based Data Filtering. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 5650–5669, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Improving Neural Conversational Models with Entropy-Based Data Filtering (Csáky et al., ACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1567.pdf
Software:
 P19-1567.Software.zip
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/P19-1567.mp4
Code
 ricsinaruto/dialog-eval +  additional community code
Data
DailyDialog