CDL: Curriculum Dual Learning for Emotion-Controllable Response Generation

Lei Shen, Yang Feng


Abstract
Emotion-controllable response generation is an attractive and valuable task that aims to make open-domain conversations more empathetic and engaging. Existing methods mainly enhance the emotion expression by adding regularization terms to standard cross-entropy loss and thus influence the training process. However, due to the lack of further consideration of content consistency, the common problem of response generation tasks, safe response, is intensified. Besides, query emotions that can help model the relationship between query and response are simply ignored in previous models, which would further hurt the coherence. To alleviate these problems, we propose a novel framework named Curriculum Dual Learning (CDL) which extends the emotion-controllable response generation to a dual task to generate emotional responses and emotional queries alternatively. CDL utilizes two rewards focusing on emotion and content to improve the duality. Additionally, it applies curriculum learning to gradually generate high-quality responses based on the difficulties of expressing various emotions. Experimental results show that CDL significantly outperforms the baselines in terms of coherence, diversity, and relation to emotion factors.
Anthology ID:
2020.acl-main.52
Volume:
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Dan Jurafsky, Joyce Chai, Natalie Schluter, Joel Tetreault
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
556–566
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.52
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.52
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Lei Shen and Yang Feng. 2020. CDL: Curriculum Dual Learning for Emotion-Controllable Response Generation. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 556–566, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
CDL: Curriculum Dual Learning for Emotion-Controllable Response Generation (Shen & Feng, ACL 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.52.pdf
Video:
 http://slideslive.com/38929331