Informative and Long-Term Response Generation using Multiple Suggestions and User Persona Retrieval in a Dialogue System

• Published in: APSIPA transactions on signal and information processing 2024-01, Vol.13 (2)
• Main Authors: Hsu, Jia-Hao, Chen, Tsai-Yi, Wu, Chung-Hsien
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Business, Economics and Politics; Economics
• ISSN: 2048-7703; 2048-7703
• DOI: 10.1561/116.00000145

Enhancing user satisfaction in dialogue systems relies on their ability to understand users and generate responses that meet their expectations. This study proposes a dialogue system that incorporates the Multi-Suggestions Transformer (MST) to generate informative and long-term responses. The MST combines empathy suggestions, system persona suggestions, and knowledge suggestions to produce comprehensive and informative responses. Additionally, the system employs a persona detection model and a persona extraction model to extract the user persona from current sentences and retrieve the most suitable user persona from the dialogue history. This facilitates long-term conversations by enabling the system to remember and respond to sentences relevant to the user persona. The proposed MST-based dialogue system outperforms the baseline in terms of informativeness, as evidenced by higher scores in BLEU, BERT-score, Distinct-n, and Perplexity on the Blended Skill Talk and Multi Session Chat datasets. Furthermore, two novel evaluation metrics, PerP and PerB, introduced in this study demonstrate the system’s effective utilization of the user persona for achieving long-term dialogue. Human subjective evaluation indicates that our model consistently outperforms the baseline, achieving superior scores of 68%, 56%, 52%, and 64% in the four subjective metrics.