Persuasion aims at forming one's opinion and action via a series of persuasive messages containing persuader's strategies. Due to its potential application in persuasive dialogue systems, the task of persuasive strategy recognition has gained much attention lately. Previous methods on user intent recognition in dialogue systems adopt recurrent neural network (RNN) or convolutional neural network (CNN) to model context in conversational history, neglecting the tactic history and intra-speaker relation. In this paper, we demonstrate the limitations of a Transformer-based approach coupled with Conditional Random Field (CRF) for the task of persuasive strategy recognition. In this model, we leverage inter- and intra-speaker contextual semantic features, as well as label dependencies to improve the recognition. Despite extensive hyper-parameter optimizations, this architecture fails to outperform the baseline methods. We observe two negative results. Firstly, CRF cannot capture persuasive label dependencies, possibly as strategies in persuasive dialogues do not follow any strict grammar or rules as the cases in Named Entity Recognition (NER) or part-of-speech (POS) tagging. Secondly, the Transformer encoder trained from scratch is less capable of capturing sequential information in persuasive dialogues than Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM). We attribute this to the reason that the vanilla Transformer encoder does not efficiently consider relative position information of sequence elements.
PersuaRL: Reinforcement Learning-Driven Multi-Expert Selection for Persuasive Dialogue Generation in Insurance
Indian Institute of Technology Patna（印度巴特那印度理工学院）；Ramakrishna Mission Vivekananda Educational and Research Institute（罗摩克里希纳使命维韦卡南达教育与研究学院）；Accenture Labs（埃森哲实验室）
PersuasiveToM: A Benchmark for Evaluating Machine Theory of Mind in Persuasive Dialogues
National Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, China（南京大学新型软件技术国家重点实验室）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Nanjing University, China（南京大学人工智能学院）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学计算机科学与工程系）；University of California, San Diego, CA, USA（美国加州大学圣地亚哥分校）
Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；University of California, Davis（加州大学戴维斯分校）；Intel Labs（英特尔实验室）
Complex conversation settings such as persuasion involve communicating changes in attitude or behavior, so users' perspectives need to be addressed, even when not directly related to the topic. In this work, we contribute a novel modular dialogue system framework that seamlessly integrates factual information and social content into persuasive dialogue. Our framework is generalizable to any dialogue tasks that have mixed social and task contents. We conducted a study that compared user evaluations of our framework versus a baseline end-to-end generation model. We found our framework was evalua…
Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学网络空间安全学院）
Persuasive strategy recognition task requires the system to recognize the adopted strategy of the persuader according to the conversation. However, previous methods mainly focus on the contextual information, little is known about incorporating the psychological feedback, i.e. emotion of the persuadee, to predict the strategy. In this paper, we propose a Cross-channel Feedback memOry Network (CFO-Net) to leverage the emotional feedback to iteratively measure the potential benefits of strategies and incorporate them into the contextual-aware dialogue information. Specifically, CFO-Net designs a…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；University of California, Davis（加州大学戴维斯分校）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）
Developing intelligent persuasive conversational agents to change people's opinions and actions for social good is the frontier in advancing the ethical development of automated dialogue systems. To do so, the first step is to understand the intricate organization of strategic disclosures and appeals employed in human persuasion conversations. We designed an online persuasion task where one participant was asked to persuade the other to donate to a specific charity. We collected a large dataset with 1,017 dialogues and annotated emerging persuasion strategies from a subset. Based on the annota…
Humans use language to refer to entities in the external world. Motivated by this, in recent years several models that incorporate a bias towards learning entity representations have been proposed. Such entity-centric models have shown empirical success, but we still know little about why. In this paper we analyze the behavior of two recently proposed entity-centric models in a referential task, Entity Linking in Multi-party Dialogue (SemEval 2018 Task 4). We show that these models outperform the state of the art on this task, and that they do better on lower frequency entities than a counterp…
Artificial Intelligence Application Research Center, Huawei Technologies（华为技术有限公司人工智能应用研究中心）
In this paper, we describe approaches for developing Emily, an emotion-affective open-domain chatbot. Emily can perceive a user's negative emotion state and offer supports by positively converting the user's emotion states. This is done by finetuning a pretrained dialogue model upon data capturing dialogue contexts and desirable emotion states transition across turns. Emily can differentiate a general open-domain dialogue utterance with questions relating to personal information. By leveraging a question-answering approach based on knowledge graphs to handle personal information, Emily maintai…
To successfully negotiate a deal, it is not enough to communicate fluently: pragmatic planning of persuasive negotiation strategies is essential. While modern dialogue agents excel at generating fluent sentences, they still lack pragmatic grounding and cannot reason strategically. We present DialoGraph, a negotiation system that incorporates pragmatic strategies in a negotiation dialogue using graph neural networks. DialoGraph explicitly incorporates dependencies between sequences of strategies to enable improved and interpretable prediction of next optimal strategies, given the dialogue conte…
Customer reviews usually contain much information about one's online shopping experience. While positive reviews are beneficial to the stores, negative ones will largely influence consumers' decision and may lead to a decline in sales. Therefore, it is of vital importance to carefully and persuasively reply to each negative review and minimize its disadvantageous effect. Recent studies consider leveraging generation models to help the sellers respond. However, this problem is not well-addressed as the reviews may contain multiple aspects of issues which should be resolved accordingly and persu…
Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（计算机科学与人工智能实验室）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）
Although deep learning models have brought tremendous advancements to the field of open-domain dialogue response generation, recent research results have revealed that the trained models have undesirable generation behaviors, such as malicious responses and generic (boring) responses. In this work, we propose a framework named "Negative Training" to minimize such behaviors. Given a trained model, the framework will first find generated samples that exhibit the undesirable behavior, and then use them to feed negative training signals for fine-tuning the model. Our experiments show that negative…
UniRetriever: Multi-task Candidates Selection for Various Context-Adaptive Conversational Retrieval
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Nankai University（南开大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））；Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab（华为诺亚方舟实验室）
Max Planck Institute for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）；The University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）
Knowledge bases (KBs) about notable entities and their properties are an important asset in applications such as search, question answering and dialogue. All popular KBs capture virtually only positive statements, and abstain from taking any stance on statements not stored in the KB. This paper makes the case for explicitly stating salient statements that do not hold. Negative statements are useful to overcome limitations of question answering systems that are mainly geared for positive questions; they can also contribute to informative summaries of entities. Due to the abundance of such inval…
AI-Salesman: Towards Reliable Large Language Model Driven Telemarketing
Chinese Information Processing Laboratory, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院软件研究所中文信息处理实验室）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
In human dialogue, a single query may elicit numerous appropriate responses. The Transformer-based dialogue model produces frequently occurring sentences in the corpus since it is a one-to-one mapping function. CVAE is a technique for reducing generic replies. In this paper, we create a new dialogue model (CVAE-T) based on the Transformer with CVAE structure. We use a pre-trained MLM model to rewrite some key n-grams in responses to obtain a series of negative examples, and introduce a regularization term during training to explicitly guide the latent variable in learning the semantic differen…
The article describes the new approach for quality improvement of automated dialogue systems for customer support service. Analysis produced in the paper demonstrates the dependency of the quality of the retrieval-based dialogue system quality on the choice of negative responses. The proposed approach implies choosing the negative samples according to the distribution of responses in the train set. In this implementation the negative samples are randomly chosen from the original response distribution and from the "artificial" distribution of negative responses, such as uniform distribution or …
School of Computer Science, Fudan University（复旦大学计算机科学学院）；Shanghai Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Processing, Fudan University（复旦大学上海市智能信息处理重点实验室）
As the functionality of dialogue systems evolves, hybrid dialogue systems that accomplish user-specific goals and participate in open-topic chitchat with users are attracting growing attention. Existing research learns both tasks concurrently utilizing a multi-task fusion technique but ignores the negative transfer phenomenon induced by the unique textual style differences. Therefore, contrastive learning based on the latent variable model is used to decouple the various textual genres in the latent space. We devise supervised and self-supervised positive and negative sample constructions for …
In retrieval-based dialogue systems, a response selection model acts as a ranker to select the most appropriate response among several candidates. However, such selection models tend to rely on context-response content similarity, which makes models vulnerable to adversarial responses that are semantically similar but not relevant to the dialogue context. Recent studies have shown that leveraging these adversarial responses as negative training samples is useful for improving the discriminating power of the selection model. Nevertheless, collecting human-written adversarial responses is expens…
Constructing a robust dialogue system on spoken conversations bring more challenge than written conversation. In this respect, DSTC10-Track2-Task2 is proposed, which aims to build a task-oriented dialogue (TOD) system incorporating unstructured external knowledge on a spoken conversation, extending DSTC9-Track1. This paper introduces our system containing four advanced methods: data construction, weighted negative sampling, post-training, and style transfer. We first automatically construct a large training data because DSTC10-Track2 does not release the official training set. For the knowledg…
Generative dialogue models suffer badly from the generic response problem, limiting their applications to a few toy scenarios. Recently, an interesting approach, namely negative training, has been proposed to alleviate this problem by reminding the model not to generate high-frequency responses during training. However, its performance is hindered by two issues, ignoring low-frequency but generic responses and bringing low-frequency but meaningless responses. In this paper, we propose a novel negative training paradigm, called negative distillation, to keep the model away from the undesirable …
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）
Open-domain neural dialogue models have achieved high performance in response ranking and evaluation tasks. These tasks are formulated as a binary classification of responses given in a dialogue context, and models generally learn to make predictions based on context-response content similarity. However, over-reliance on content similarity makes the models less sensitive to the presence of inconsistencies, incorrect time expressions and other factors important for response appropriateness and coherence. We propose approaches for automatically creating adversarial negative training data to help…
Crisp: Cognitive Restructuring of Negative Thoughts through Multi-turn Supportive Dialogues
The CoAI Group, DCST, Tsinghua University（清华大学自动化研究所）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）；Lingxin AI（灵犀AI）；Harvard Graduate School of Education, Harvard University（哈佛大学教育研究生院）；Department of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences, Zhejiang University（浙江大学心理学与行为科学系）；Fuxi AI Lab（伏羲AI实验室）
Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Neural dialogue response generation has gained much popularity in recent years. Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) objective is widely adopted in existing dialogue model learning. However, models trained with MLE objective function are plagued by the low-diversity issue when it comes to the open-domain conversational setting. Inspired by the observation that humans not only learn from the positive signals but also benefit from correcting behaviors of undesirable actions, in this work, we introduce contrastive learning into dialogue generation, where the model explicitly perceives the differen…
Mitigating the Negative Impact of Over-association for Conversational Query Production
School of Information, Xiamen University（厦门大学信息学院）；Xiamen Key Laboratory of Intelligent Storage and Computing（厦门智能存储与计算重点实验室）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯AI实验室）；College of Computer and Control Engineering, Minjiang University（闽江学院计算机与控制工程学院）
Carleton University（卡尔顿大学）；National Research Council Canada（加拿大国家研究委员会）
Emotion dynamics is a framework for measuring how an individual's emotions change over time. It is a powerful tool for understanding how we behave and interact with the world. In this paper, we introduce a framework to track emotion dynamics through one's utterances. Specifically we introduce a number of utterance emotion dynamics (UED) metrics inspired by work in Psychology. We use this approach to trace emotional arcs of movie characters. We analyze thousands of such character arcs to test hypotheses that inform our broader understanding of stories. Notably, we show that there is a tendency …
Recent progress on neural approaches for language processing has triggered a resurgence of interest on building intelligent open-domain chatbots. However, even the state-of-the-art neural chatbots cannot produce satisfying responses for every turn in a dialog. A practical solution is to generate multiple response candidates for the same context, and then perform response ranking/selection to determine which candidate is the best. Previous work in response selection typically trains response rankers using synthetic data that is formed from existing dialogs by using a ground truth response as th…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）；Westlake University（西湖大学）；Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen)（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））
This ability to learn consecutive tasks without forgetting how to perform previously trained problems is essential for developing an online dialogue system. This paper proposes an effective continual learning for the task-oriented dialogue system with iterative network pruning, expanding and masking (TPEM), which preserves performance on previously encountered tasks while accelerating learning progress on subsequent tasks. Specifically, TPEM (i) leverages network pruning to keep the knowledge for old tasks, (ii) adopts network expanding to create free weights for new tasks, and (iii) introduce…
MultiWOZ 2.0 (Budzianowski et al., 2018) is a recently released multi-domain dialogue dataset spanning 7 distinct domains and containing over 10,000 dialogues. Though immensely useful and one of the largest resources of its kind to-date, MultiWOZ 2.0 has a few shortcomings. Firstly, there is substantial noise in the dialogue state annotations and dialogue utterances which negatively impact the performance of state-tracking models. Secondly, follow-up work (Lee et al., 2019) has augmented the original dataset with user dialogue acts. This leads to multiple co-existent versions of the same datas…
We present two categories of model-agnostic adversarial strategies that reveal the weaknesses of several generative, task-oriented dialogue models: Should-Not-Change strategies that evaluate over-sensitivity to small and semantics-preserving edits, as well as Should-Change strategies that test if a model is over-stable against subtle yet semantics-changing modifications. We next perform adversarial training with each strategy, employing a max-margin approach for negative generative examples. This not only makes the target dialogue model more robust to the adversarial inputs, but also helps it …
MA$^{2}$P: A Meta-Cognitive Autonomous Intelligent Agents Framework for Complex Persuasion
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Key Laboratory of Computer Network and Information Integration, Ministry of Education, Southeast University, China（计算机科学与工程学院、计算机网络与信息集成重点实验室、教育部、东南大学，中国）；Department of Informatics, King’s College London（信息学院、伦敦国王学院）
Using robots in educational contexts has already shown to be beneficial for a student's learning and social behaviour. For levitating them to the next level of providing more effective and human-like tutoring, the ability to adapt to the user and to express proactivity is fundamental. By acting proactively, intelligent robotic tutors anticipate possible situations where problems for the student may arise and act in advance for preventing negative outcomes. Still, the decisions of when and how to behave proactively are open questions. Therefore, this paper deals with the investigation of how th…
