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Non-deterministic and emotional chatting machine: learning emotional conversation generation using conditional variational autoencoders

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Abstract

Conversational responses are non-trivial for artificial conversational agents. Artificial responses should not only be meaningful and plausible, but should also (1) have an emotional context and (2) should be non-deterministic (i.e., vary given the same input). The two factors enumerated, respectively, above are involved and this is demonstrated such that previous studies have tackled them individually. This paper is the first to tackle them together. Specifically, we present two models both based upon conditional variational autoencoders. The first model learns disentangled latent representations to generate conversational responses given a specific emotion. The other model explicitly learns different emotions using a mixture of multivariate Gaussian distributions. Experiments show that our proposed models can generate more plausible and diverse conversation responses in accordance with designated emotions compared to baseline approaches.

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Notes

  1. http://aihuang.org:8000/p/challenge.html.

  2. http://tcci.ccf.org.cn/conference/2014/dldoc/evatask1.pdf.

  3. 0, 1 and 2 are content scores. 0 denotes content irrelevancy, 1 denotes moderately relevant content and 2 denotes content relevancy.

  4. 0 and 1 are emotion scores. 0 denotes that the emotion in response generated by our models is inconsistent with the given emotion category, and 1 denotes that the emotion in response is consistent with the given emotion category.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, Grant No. 61807033, the Key Research Program of Frontier Sciences, CAS, Grant No. ZDBS-LY-JSC038. Libo Zhang was supported by Youth Innovation Promotion Association, CAS (2020111) and Outstanding Youth Scientist Project of ISCAS.

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Author notes

  1. Kaichun Yao and Tiejian Luo were contributed equally and should be considered as co-first authors.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Kaichun Yao, Tiejian Luo & Dawei Du

  2. State Key Laboratory of Computer Science, Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences, No. 4 North Road, Beijing, China

    Libo Zhang & Yanjun Wu

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  1. Kaichun Yao
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  2. Libo Zhang
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Correspondence to Libo Zhang.

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Yao, K., Zhang, L., Luo, T. et al. Non-deterministic and emotional chatting machine: learning emotional conversation generation using conditional variational autoencoders. Neural Comput & Applic 33, 5581–5589 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00521-020-05338-z

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