Responsive and Self-Expressive Dialogue Generation

A neural conversation model is a promising approach to develop dialogue systems with the ability of chit-chat. It allows training a model in an end-to-end manner without complex rule design nor feature engineering. However, as a side effect, the neural model tends to generate safe but uninformative and insensitive responses like “OK” and “I don’t know.” Such replies are called generic responses and regarded as a critical problem for user-engagement of dialogue systems. For a more engaging chit-chat experience, we propose a neural conversation model that generates responsive and self-expressive replies. Specifically, our model generates domain-aware and sentiment-rich responses. Experiments empirically confirmed that our model outperformed the sequence-to-sequence model; 68.1% of our responses were domain-aware with sentiment polarities, which was only 2.7% for responses generated by the sequence-to-sequence model.