2020/12/15 by Peixiang Zhong, Zhong, Peixiang, Yong Liu +5 · 1 citation
Computer Science · #Advanced Text Analysis Techniques #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining #Topic Modeling #cs.AI #cs.CL
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2012.08383
AAAI-2021
openalex publication_date 2020/12/15 · arxiv created 2021/02/28 · arxiv updated 2021/03/02 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
We study the problem of imposing conversational goals/keywords on open-domain conversational agents, where the agent is required to lead the conversation to a target keyword smoothly and fast. Solving this problem enables the application of conversational agents in many real-world scenarios, e.g., recommendation and psychotherapy. The dominant paradigm for tackling this problem is to 1) train a next-turn keyword classifier, and 2) train a keyword-augmented response retrieval model. However, existing approaches in this paradigm have two limitations: 1) the training and evaluation datasets for next-turn keyword classification are directly extracted from conversations without human annotations, thus, they are noisy and have low correlation with human judgements, and 2) during keyword transition, the agents solely rely on the similarities between word embeddings to move closer to the target keyword, which may not reflect how humans converse. In this paper, we assume that human conversations are grounded on commonsense and propose a keyword-guided neural conversational model that can leverage external commonsense knowledge graphs (CKG) for both keyword transition and response retrieval. Automatic evaluations suggest that commonsense improves the performance of both next-turn keyword prediction and keyword-augmented response retrieval. In addition, both self-play and human evaluations show that our model produces responses with smoother keyword transition and reaches the target keyword faster than competitive baselines.