No Arabic abstract
Personalized chatbots focus on endowing chatbots with a consistent personality to behave like real users, give more informative responses, and further act as personal assistants. Existing personalized approaches tried to incorporate several text descriptions as explicit user profiles. However, the acquisition of such explicit profiles is expensive and time-consuming, thus being impractical for large-scale real-world applications. Moreover, the restricted predefined profile neglects the language behavior of a real user and cannot be automatically updated together with the change of user interests. In this paper, we propose to learn implicit user profiles automatically from large-scale user dialogue history for building personalized chatbots. Specifically, leveraging the benefits of Transformer on language understanding, we train a personalized language model to construct a general user profile from the users historical responses. To highlight the relevant historical responses to the input post, we further establish a key-value memory network of historical post-response pairs, and build a dynamic post-aware user profile. The dynamic profile mainly describes what and how the user has responded to similar posts in history. To explicitly utilize users frequently used words, we design a personalized decoder to fuse two decoding strategies, including generating a word from the generic vocabulary and copying one word from the users personalized vocabulary. Experiments on two real-world datasets show the significant improvement of our model compared with existing methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/zhengyima/DHAP
In this paper, we explore the problem of developing personalized chatbots. A personalized chatbot is designed as a digital chatting assistant for a user. The key characteristic of a personalized chatbot is that it should have a consistent personality with the corresponding user. It can talk the same way as the user when it is delegated to respond to others messages. We present a retrieval-based personalized chatbot model, namely IMPChat, to learn an implicit user profile from the users dialogue history. We argue that the implicit user profile is superior to the explicit user profile regarding accessibility and flexibility. IMPChat aims to learn an implicit user profile through modeling users personalized language style and personalized preferences separately. To learn a users personalized language style, we elaborately build language models from shallow to deep using the users historical responses; To model a users personalized preferences, we explore the conditional relations underneath each post-response pair of the user. The personalized preferences are dynamic and context-aware: we assign higher weights to those historical pairs that are topically related to the current query when aggregating the personalized preferences. We match each response candidate with the personalized language style and personalized preference, respectively, and fuse the two matching signals to determine the final ranking score. Comprehensive experiments on two large datasets show that our method outperforms all baseline models.
Natural language dialogue systems raise great attention recently. As many dialogue models are data-driven, high-quality datasets are essential to these systems. In this paper, we introduce Pchatbot, a large-scale dialogue dataset that contains two subsets collected from Weibo and Judicial forums respectively. To adapt the raw dataset to dialogue systems, we elaborately normalize the raw dataset via processes such as anonymization, deduplication, segmentation, and filtering. The scale of Pchatbot is significantly larger than existing Chinese datasets, which might benefit the data-driven models. Besides, current dialogue datasets for personalized chatbot usually contain several persona sentences or attributes. Different from existing datasets, Pchatbot provides anonymized user IDs and timestamps for both posts and responses. This enables the development of personalized dialogue models that directly learn implicit user personality from the users dialogue history. Our preliminary experimental study benchmarks several state-of-the-art dialogue models to provide a comparison for future work. The dataset can be publicly accessed at Github.
Personalized dialogue systems are an essential step toward better human-machine interaction. Existing personalized dialogue agents rely on properly designed conversational datasets, which are mostly monolingual (e.g., English), which greatly limits the usage of conversational agents in other languages. In this paper, we propose a multi-lingual extension of Persona-Chat, namely XPersona. Our dataset includes persona conversations in six different languages other than English for building and evaluating multilingual personalized agents. We experiment with both multilingual and cross-lingual trained baselines, and evaluate them against monolingual and translation-pipeline models using both automatic and human evaluation. Experimental results show that the multilingual trained models outperform the translation-pipeline and that they are on par with the monolingual models, with the advantage of having a single model across multiple languages. On the other hand, the state-of-the-art cross-lingual trained models achieve inferior performance to the other models, showing that cross-lingual conversation modeling is a challenging task. We hope that our dataset and baselines will accelerate research in multilingual dialogue systems.
In recent years, chatbots have been empowered to engage in social conversations with humans and have the potential to elicit people to disclose their personal experiences, opinions, and emotions. However, how and to what extent people respond to chabots self-disclosure remain less known. In this work, we designed a social chatbot with three self-disclosure levels that conducted small talks and provided relevant recommendations to people. 372 MTurk participants were randomized to one of the four groups with different self-disclosure levels to converse with the chatbot on two topics, movies, and COVID-19. We found that peoples self-disclosure level was strongly reciprocal to a chatbots self-disclosure level. Chatbots self-disclosure also positively impacted engagement and users perception of the bot and led to a more effective recommendation such that participants enjoyed and agreed more with the recommendations.
Existing multi-turn context-response matching methods mainly concentrate on obtaining multi-level and multi-dimension representations and better interactions between context utterances and response. However, in real-place conversation scenarios, whether a response candidate is suitable not only counts on the given dialogue context but also other backgrounds, e.g., wording habits, user-specific dialogue history content. To fill the gap between these up-to-date methods and the real-world applications, we incorporate user-specific dialogue history into the response selection and propose a personalized hybrid matching network (PHMN). Our contributions are two-fold: 1) our model extracts personalized wording behaviors from user-specific dialogue history as extra matching information; 2) we perform hybrid representation learning on context-response utterances and explicitly incorporate a customized attention mechanism to extract vital information from context-response interactions so as to improve the accuracy of matching. We evaluate our model on two large datasets with user identification, i.e., personalized Ubuntu dialogue Corpus (P-Ubuntu) and personalized Weibo dataset (P-Weibo). Experimental results confirm that our method significantly outperforms several strong models by combining personalized attention, wording behaviors, and hybrid representation learning.