Jixiong Chen


2024

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Personalized Topic Selection Model for Topic-Grounded Dialogue
Shixuan Fan | Wei Wei | Xiaofei Wen | Xian-Ling Mao | Jixiong Chen | Dangyang Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024

Recently, the topic-grounded dialogue (TGD) system has become increasingly popular as its powerful capability to actively guide users to accomplish specific tasks through topic-guided conversations. Most existing works utilize side information (e.g. topics or personas) in isolation to enhance the topic selection ability. However, due to disregarding the noise within these auxiliary information sources and their mutual influence, current models tend to predict user-uninteresting and contextually irrelevant topics. To build user-engaging and coherent dialogue agent, we propose a personalized topic selection model for topic-grounded dialogue, named PETD, which takes account of the interaction of side information to selectively aggregate such information for more accurately predicting subsequent topics. Specifically, we evaluate the correlation between global topics and personas and selectively incorporate the global topics aligned with user personas. Furthermore, we propose a contrastive learning based persona selector to filter relevant personas under the constraint of lacking pertinent persona annotations. Throughout the selection and generation, diverse relevant side information is considered. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method can generate engaging and diverse responses, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines across various evaluation metrics.

2023

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Miracle: Towards Personalized Dialogue Generation with Latent-Space Multiple Personal Attribute Control
Zhenyi Lu | Wei Wei | Xiaoye Qu | Xian-Ling Mao | Dangyang Chen | Jixiong Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Personalized dialogue systems aim to endow the chatbot agent with more anthropomorphic traits for human-like interactions. Previous approaches have explored explicitly user profile modeling using text descriptions, implicit derivation of user embeddings, or utilizing handicraft prompts for ChatGPT-like models. However, textual personas are limited in describing multi-faceted attributes (e.g., language style, inner character nuances), implicit embedding suffers from personality sparsity, and handicraft prompts lack fine-grained and stable controllability. Hence, these approaches may struggle with complex personalized dialogue generation tasks that require generating controllable responses with multiple personal attributes. To this end, we propose Miracle, a novel personalized dialogue generation method through MultIple PeRsonal Attributes Control within Latent-Space Energy-based Models. ttributes Control within Latent-Space Energy-based Models. Specifically, our approach first disentangles complex personality into multi-faceted attributes. Subsequently, we employ a conditional variational auto-encoder to align with the dense personalized responses within a latent joint attribute space. We have also tailored a dedicated energy function and customized the ordinary differential equations sampling method to offer flexible attribute composition and precise attribute control. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Miracle outperforms several strong baselines in terms of personality controllability and response generation quality. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/LZY-the-boys/MIRACLE