Structuring Latent Spaces for Stylized Response Generation

Xiang Gao, Yizhe Zhang, Sungjin Lee, Michel Galley, Chris Brockett, Jianfeng Gao, Bill Dolan


Abstract
Generating responses in a targeted style is a useful yet challenging task, especially in the absence of parallel data. With limited data, existing methods tend to generate responses that are either less stylized or less context-relevant. We propose StyleFusion, which bridges conversation modeling and non-parallel style transfer by sharing a structured latent space. This structure allows the system to generate stylized relevant responses by sampling in the neighborhood of the conversation model prediction, and continuously control the style level. We demonstrate this method using dialogues from Reddit data and two sets of sentences with distinct styles (arXiv and Sherlock Holmes novels). Automatic and human evaluation show that, without sacrificing appropriateness, the system generates responses of the targeted style and outperforms competitive baselines.
Anthology ID:
D19-1190
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, Xiaojun Wan
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1814–1823
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1190
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1190
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xiang Gao, Yizhe Zhang, Sungjin Lee, Michel Galley, Chris Brockett, Jianfeng Gao, and Bill Dolan. 2019. Structuring Latent Spaces for Stylized Response Generation. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 1814–1823, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Structuring Latent Spaces for Stylized Response Generation (Gao et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1190.pdf
Code
 golsun/StyleFusion