Neural Conversation Generation with Auxiliary Emotional Supervised Models

Abstract

An important aspect of developing dialogue agents involves endowing a conversation system with emotion perception and interaction. Most existing emotion dialogue models lack the adaptability and extensibility of different scenes because of their limitation to require a specified emotion category or their reliance on a fixed emotional dictionary. To overcome these limitations, we propose a neural conversation generation with auxiliary emotional supervised model (nCG-ESM) comprising a sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) generation model and an emotional classifier used as an auxiliary model. The emotional classifier was trained to predict the emotion distributions of the dialogues, which were then used as emotion supervised signals to guide the generation model to generate diverse emotional responses. The proposed nCG-ESM is flexible enough to generate responses with emotional diversity, including specified or unspecified emotions, which can be adapted and extended to different scenarios. We conducted extensive experiments on the popular dataset of Weibo post--response pairs. Experimental results showed that the proposed model was capable of producing more diverse, appropriate, and emotionally rich responses, yielding substantial gains in diversity scores and human evaluations.