Neural personalized response generation as domain adaptation

作者:Zhang, Wei-Nan*; Zhu, Qingfu; Wang, Yifa; Zhao, Yanyan; Liu, Ting
来源:World Wide Web-internet and Web Information Systems, 2019, 22(4): 1427-1446.
DOI:10.1007/s11280-018-0598-6

摘要

One of the most crucial problem on training personalized response generation models for conversational robots is the lack of large scale personal conversation data. To address the problem, we propose a two-phase approach, namely initialization then adaptation, to first pre-train an optimized RNN encoder-decoder model (LTS model) in a large scale conversational data for general response generation and then fine-tune the model in a small scale personal conversation data to generate personalized responses. For evaluation, we propose a novel human aided method, which can be seen as a quasi-Turing test, to evaluate the performance of the personalized response generation models. Experimental results show that the proposed personalized response generation model outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches to language model personalization and persona-based neural conversation generation on the automatic evaluation, offline human judgment and the quasi-Turing test.