Recent years have witnessed great progress on building emotional chatbots. Tremendous methods have been proposed for chatbots to generate responses with given emotions. However, the emotion changes of the user during the conversation has not been fully explored. In this work, we study the problem of positive emotion elicitation, which aims to generate responses that can elicit positive emotion of the user, in human-machine conversation. We propose a weakly supervised Emotion Eliciting Machine (EEM) to address this problem. Specifically, we first collect weak labels of user emotion status changes in a conversion based on a pre-trained emotion classifier. Then we propose a dual encoder-decoder structure to model the generation of responses in both positive and negative side based on the changes of the users emotion status in the conversation. An emotion eliciting factor is introduced on top of the dual structure to balance the positive and negative emotional impacts on the generated response during emotion elicitation. The factor also provides a fine-grained controlling manner for emotion elicitation. Experimental results on a large real-world dataset show that EEM outperforms the existing models in generating responses with positive emotion elicitation.
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