Identifying relevant persona or knowledge for conversational systems is critical to grounded dialogue response generation. However, each grounding has been mostly researched in isolation with more practical multi-context dialogue tasks introduced in recent works. We define Persona and Knowledge Dual Context Identification as the task to identify persona and knowledge jointly for a given dialogue, which could be of elevated importance in complex multi-context dialogue settings. We develop a novel grounding retrieval method that utilizes all contexts of dialogue simultaneously. Our method requires less computational power via utilizing neural QA retrieval models. We further introduce our novel null-positive rank test which measures ranking performance on semantically dissimilar samples (i.e. hard negatives) in relation to data augmentation.

The use of persona-grounded retrieval-based chatbots is crucial for personalized conversations, but there are several challenges that need to be addressed. 1) In general, collecting persona-grounded corpus is very expensive. 2) The chatbot system does not always respond in consideration of persona at real applications. To address these challenges, we propose a plug-and-play persona prompting method. Our system can function as a standard open-domain chatbot if persona information is not available. We demonstrate that this approach performs well in the zero-shot setting, which reduces the dependence on persona-ground training data. This makes it easier to expand the system to other languages without the need to build a persona-grounded corpus. Additionally, our model can be fine-tuned for even better performance. In our experiments, the zero-shot model improved the standard model by 7.71 and 1.04 points in the original persona and revised persona, respectively. The fine-tuned model improved the previous state-of-the-art system by 1.95 and 3.39 points in the original persona and revised persona, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to solve the problem of personalized response selection using prompt sequences. Our code is available on github.

As the use of interactive machines grow, the task of Emotion Recognition in Conversation (ERC) became more important. If the machine-generated sentences reflect emotion, more human-like sympathetic conversations are possible. Since emotion recognition in conversation is inaccurate if the previous utterances are not taken into account, many studies reflect the dialogue context to improve the performances. Many recent approaches show performance improvement by combining knowledge into modules learned from external structured data. However, structured data is difficult to access in non-English languages, making it difficult to extend to other languages. Therefore, we extract the pre-trained memory using the pre-trained language model as an extractor of external knowledge. We introduce CoMPM, which combines the speaker’s pre-trained memory with the context model, and find that the pre-trained memory significantly improves the performance of the context model. CoMPM achieves the first or second performance on all data and is state-of-the-art among systems that do not leverage structured data. In addition, our method shows that it can be extended to other languages because structured knowledge is not required, unlike previous methods. Our code is available on github .

Our study focuses on language generation by considering various information representing the meaning of utterances as multiple conditions of generation. Generating an utterance from a Meaning representation (MR) usually passes two steps: sentence planning and surface realization. However, we propose a simple one-stage framework to generate utterances directly from MR. Our model is based on GPT2 and generates utterances with flat conditions on slot and value pairs, which does not need to determine the structure of the sentence. We evaluate several systems in the E2E dataset with 6 automatic metrics. Our system is a simple method, but it demonstrates comparable performance to previous systems in automated metrics. In addition, using only 10% of the dataset without any other techniques, our model achieves comparable performance, and shows the possibility of performing zero-shot generation and expanding to other datasets.

Text style transfer is the task that generates a sentence by preserving the content of the input sentence and transferring the style. Most existing studies are progressing on non-parallel datasets because parallel datasets are limited and hard to construct. In this work, we introduce a method that follows two stages in non-parallel datasets. The first stage is to delete attribute markers of a sentence directly through a classifier. The second stage is to generate a transferred sentence by combining the content tokens and the target style. We experiment on two benchmark datasets and evaluate context, style, fluency, and semantic. It is difficult to select the best system using only these automatic metrics, but it is possible to select stable systems. We consider only robust systems in all automatic evaluation metrics to be the minimum conditions that can be used in real applications. Many previous systems are difficult to use in certain situations because performance is significantly lower in several evaluation metrics. However, our system is stable in all automatic evaluation metrics and has results comparable to other models. Also, we compare the performance results of our system and the unstable system through human evaluation.