A Controllable Model of Grounded Response Generation
This addresses the issue of generating relevant and informative responses in dialogue systems, though it is incremental as it builds on existing transformer models with a novel attention mechanism.
The paper tackles the problem of neural conversation models lacking semantic control, which leads to uninteresting or factually inaccurate responses, by proposing a controllable grounded response generation framework that uses lexical control phrases; results show it outperforms strong baselines on a Reddit dataset.
Current end-to-end neural conversation models inherently lack the flexibility to impose semantic control in the response generation process, often resulting in uninteresting responses. Attempts to boost informativeness alone come at the expense of factual accuracy, as attested by pretrained language models' propensity to "hallucinate" facts. While this may be mitigated by access to background knowledge, there is scant guarantee of relevance and informativeness in generated responses. We propose a framework that we call controllable grounded response generation (CGRG), in which lexical control phrases are either provided by a user or automatically extracted by a control phrase predictor from dialogue context and grounding knowledge. Quantitative and qualitative results show that, using this framework, a transformer based model with a novel inductive attention mechanism, trained on a conversation-like Reddit dataset, outperforms strong generation baselines.