Explicit Use of Topicality in Dialogue Response Generation

Abstract

The current chat dialogue systems implicitly consider the topic given the context, but not explicitly. As a result, these systems often generate inconsistent responses with the topic of the moment. In this study, we propose a dialogue system that responds appropriately following the topic by selecting the entity with the highest “topicality.” In topicality estimation, the model is trained through self-supervised learning that regards entities appearing in both context and response as the topic entities. In response generation, the model is trained to generate topic-relevant responses based on the estimated topicality. Experimental results show that our proposed system can follow the topic more than the existing dialogue system that considers only the context.