CoMIF: Modeling of Complex Multiple Interaction Factors for Conversation Generation

Abstract

Highly realistic human-machine interaction is challenging for open-domain dialogue systems. Although existing methods have achieved notable progress by leveraging various interaction factors (e.g., emotion, personality, topic) for delivering human-like (e.g., empathetic, personalized and semantically-consistent) responses, they typically model such factor alone and thus easily suffer from low-quality response generation issue. We attribute this limitation to the neglect of implicit-correlations among factors. Furthermore, different factors may alternately dominate token-level response generation during decoding, making it harder to generate high-quality responses by applying various factors at the sentence level. To address the issue, we present a unified response generation framework, which is capable of simultaneously modeling Complex Multiple Interaction Factors (named CoMIF) to generate human-like conversations. To model the implicit correlations among factors, CoMIF first employ a dynamic perception module to construct a directed collaborative-graph to jointly learn the dynamics over time of each factor, as well as the cross-dependencies among them. Additionally, we also design a scalable post-adaptation module to introduce token-level factor signals to generate more human-like responses with appropriately multiple factors. Extensive experiments over multiple datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves the superior performance in generating more human-like responses with appropriate multiple-factors, as compared to the state-of-the-art methods.