Consistent Response Generation with Controlled Specificity

Abstract

We propose a method to control the specificity of responses while maintaining the consistency with the utterances. We first design a metric based on pointwise mutual information, which measures the co-occurrence degree between an utterance and a response. To control the specificity of generated responses, we add the distant supervision based on the co-occurrence degree and a PMI-based word prediction mechanism to a sequence-to-sequence model. With these mechanisms, our model outputs the words with optimal specificity for a given specificity control variable. In experiments with open-domain dialogue corpora, automatic and human evaluation results confirm that our model controls the specificity of the response more sensitively than the conventional model and can generate highly consistent responses.

Tasks

Reproductions