AFEC: A Knowledge Graph Capturing Social Intelligence in Casual Conversations
This work addresses the challenge of social intelligence in conversational AI for chatbots, though it is incremental as it builds on existing empathetic dialog models with a new knowledge graph approach.
The paper tackles the problem of enabling chatbots to understand and generate empathetic responses in casual conversations by introducing AFEC, an automatically curated knowledge graph from Reddit data, resulting in a retrieval-based chatbot that achieves at least 15% higher diversity scores in human evaluation while outperforming two out of four baselines in response quality.
This paper introduces AFEC, an automatically curated knowledge graph based on people's day-to-day casual conversations. The knowledge captured in this graph bears potential for conversational systems to understand how people offer acknowledgement, consoling, and a wide range of empathetic responses in social conversations. For this body of knowledge to be comprehensive and meaningful, we curated a large-scale corpus from the r/CasualConversation SubReddit. After taking the first two turns of all conversations, we obtained 134K speaker nodes and 666K listener nodes. To demonstrate how a chatbot can converse in social settings, we built a retrieval-based chatbot and compared it with existing empathetic dialog models. Experiments show that our model is capable of generating much more diverse responses (at least 15% higher diversity scores in human evaluation), while still outperforming two out of the four baselines in terms of response quality.