Conversations Are Not Flat: Modeling the Dynamic Information Flow across Dialogue Utterances
This work addresses the limitation of current open-domain dialogue models in handling dynamic conversational flow, offering a novel approach for more natural human-bot interactions.
The authors tackled the problem of flat dialogue modeling by introducing DialoFlow, a model that captures dynamic information flow across utterances, achieving significant performance improvements over DialoGPT on dialogue generation tasks and proposing a new automatic metric with high correlation to human ratings.
Nowadays, open-domain dialogue models can generate acceptable responses according to the historical context based on the large-scale pre-trained language models. However, they generally concatenate the dialogue history directly as the model input to predict the response, which we named as the flat pattern and ignores the dynamic information flow across dialogue utterances. In this work, we propose the DialoFlow model, in which we introduce a dynamic flow mechanism to model the context flow, and design three training objectives to capture the information dynamics across dialogue utterances by addressing the semantic influence brought about by each utterance in large-scale pre-training. Experiments on the multi-reference Reddit Dataset and DailyDialog Dataset demonstrate that our DialoFlow significantly outperforms the DialoGPT on the dialogue generation task. Besides, we propose the Flow score, an effective automatic metric for evaluating interactive human-bot conversation quality based on the pre-trained DialoFlow, which presents high chatbot-level correlation ($r=0.9$) with human ratings among 11 chatbots. Code and pre-trained models will be public. \footnote{\url{https://github.com/ictnlp/DialoFlow}}