Towards Interpretable Chit-chat: Open Domain Dialogue Generation with Dialogue Acts

Abstract

Conventional methods model open domain dialogue generation as a black box through end-to-end learning from large scale conversation data. In this work, we make the first step to open the black box by introducing dialogue acts into open domain dialogue generation. The dialogue acts are generally designed and reveal how people engage in social chat. Inspired by analysis on real data, we propose jointly modeling dialogue act selection and response generation, and perform learning with human-human conversations tagged with a dialogue act classifier and a reinforcement approach to further optimizing the model for long-term conversation. With the dialogue acts, we not only achieve significant improvement over state-of-the-art methods on response quality for given contexts and long-term conversation in both machine-machine simulation and human-machine conversation, but also are capable of explaining why such achievements can be made.

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Reproductions