Dirichlet Latent Variable Hierarchical Recurrent Encoder-Decoder in Dialogue Generation

Variational encoder-decoders have achieved well-recognized performance in the dialogue generation task. Existing works simply assume the Gaussian priors of the latent variable, which are incapable of representing complex latent variables effectively. To address the issues, we propose to use the Dirichlet distribution with flexible structures to characterize the latent variables in place of the traditional Gaussian distribution, called Dirichlet Latent Variable Hierarchical Recurrent Encoder-Decoder model (Dir-VHRED). Based on which, we further find that there is redundancy among the dimensions of latent variable, and the lengths and sentence patterns of the responses can be strongly correlated to each dimension of the latent variable. Therefore, controllable responses can be generated through specifying the value of each dimension of the latent variable. Experimental results on benchmarks show that our proposed Dir-VHRED yields substantial improvements on negative log-likelihood, word-embedding-based and human evaluations.