Learning to Memorize Entailment and Discourse Relations for Persona-Consistent Dialogues

Authors

  • Ruijun Chen Yunnan University
  • Jin Wang Yunnan University
  • Liang-Chih Yu Yuan Ze University
  • Xuejie Zhang Yunnan University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v37i11.26489

Keywords:

SNLP: Conversational AI/Dialogue Systems, SNLP: Generation, SNLP: Question Answering

Abstract

Maintaining engagement and consistency is particularly important in dialogue systems. Existing works have improved the performance of dialogue systems by intentionally learning interlocutor personas with sophisticated network structures. One issue with this approach is that it requires more personal corpora with annotations. Additionally, these models typically perform the next utterance prediction to generate a response but neglect the discourse coherence in the entire conversation. To address these issues, this study proposes a method of learning to memorize entailment and discourse relations for persona-consistent dialogue tasks. Entailment text pairs in natural language inference dataset were applied to learn latent entailment relations as external memories by premise-to-hypothesis generation task. Furthermore, an internal memory with a similar architecture was applied to the discourse information in the dialogue. Placing orthogonality restrictions on these two memory spaces ensures that the latent entailment relations remain dialogue-independent. Both memories collaborate to obtain entailment and discourse representation for the generation, allowing a deeper understanding of both consistency and coherence. Experiments on two large public datasets, PersonaChat and DSTC7-AVSD, demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method. Both automatic and human evaluations indicate that the proposed model outperforms several strong baselines in terms of both persona consistency and response coherence. Our source code is availabled at https://github.com/Chenrj233/LMEDR.

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Published

2023-06-26

How to Cite

Chen, R., Wang, J., Yu, L.-C., & Zhang, X. (2023). Learning to Memorize Entailment and Discourse Relations for Persona-Consistent Dialogues. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 37(11), 12653-12661. https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v37i11.26489

Issue

Section

AAAI Technical Track on Speech & Natural Language Processing