Linguistically-Informed Specificity and Semantic Plausibility for Dialogue Generation

NAACL 2019  ·  Wei-Jen Ko, Greg Durrett, Junyi Jessy Li ·

Sequence-to-sequence models for open-domain dialogue generation tend to favor generic, uninformative responses. Past work has focused on word frequency-based approaches to improving specificity, such as penalizing responses with only common words. In this work, we examine whether specificity is solely a frequency-related notion and find that more linguistically-driven specificity measures are better suited to improving response informativeness. However, we find that forcing a sequence-to-sequence model to be more specific can expose a host of other problems in the responses, including flawed discourse and implausible semantics. We rerank our model{'}s outputs using externally-trained classifiers targeting each of these identified factors. Experiments show that our final model using linguistically motivated specificity and plausibility reranking improves the informativeness, reasonableness, and grammatically of responses.

PDF Abstract

Results from the Paper


  Submit results from this paper to get state-of-the-art GitHub badges and help the community compare results to other papers.

Methods


No methods listed for this paper. Add relevant methods here