Emotional Conversation Generation With Bilingual Interactive Decoding

Abstract

The perception and expression of emotion, as well as the content of a text, are key factors in the success of conversational agents. However, previous models for conversation generation handled single-language pairs during training and testing, neglecting the complementary information from different languages. In this article, we propose a bilingual-aided interactive approach that can simultaneously and interactively generate bilingual emotional replies to monolingual posts. Specifically, the generation of one emotional reply relies on the output of the encoder, the generated tokens, and the interactive information from the other language decoder. The interactive approach includes 1) internal interaction to capture the change in implicit contextual information and 2) external interaction to balance grammaticality and the expression of emotion. Qualitative and quantitative experiments with NLPCC2017 show that our model performs better in terms of the content and emotion of replies than several state-of-the-art approaches.