What, When, and How to Ground: Designing User Persona-Aware Conversational Agents for Engaging Dialogue
Deuksin Kwon, Sunwoo Lee, Ki Hyun Kim, Seojin Lee, Taeyoon Kim, Eric Davis
Abstract
This paper presents a method for building a personalized open-domain dialogue system to address the WWH (WHAT, WHEN, and HOW) problem for natural response generation in a commercial setting, where personalized dialogue responses are heavily interleaved with casual response turns. The proposed approach involves weighted dataset blending, negative persona information augmentation methods, and the design of personalized conversation datasets to address the challenges of WWH in personalized, open-domain dialogue systems. Our work effectively balances dialogue fluency and tendency to ground, while also introducing a response-type label to improve the controllability and explainability of the grounded responses. The combination of these methods leads to more fluent conversations, as evidenced by subjective human evaluations as well as objective evaluations.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{kwon-etal-2023-ground,
title = "What, When, and How to Ground: Designing User Persona-Aware Conversational Agents for Engaging Dialogue",
author = "Kwon, Deuksin and
Lee, Sunwoo and
Kim, Ki Hyun and
Lee, Seojin and
Kim, Taeyoon and
Davis, Eric",
editor = "Sitaram, Sunayana and
Beigman Klebanov, Beata and
Williams, Jason D",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 5: Industry Track)",
month = jul,
year = "2023",
address = "Toronto, Canada",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-industry.68/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.acl-industry.68",
pages = "707--719"
}