Abstract
Existing neural conversational models process natural language primarily on a lexico-syntactic level, thereby ignoring one of the most crucial components of human-to-human dialogue: its affective content. We take a step in this direction by proposing three novel ways to incorporate affective/emotional aspects into long short term memory (LSTM) encoder-decoder neural conversation models: (1) affective word embeddings, which are cognitively engineered, (2) affect-based objective functions that augment the standard cross-entropy loss, and (3) affectively diverse beam search for decoding. Experiments show that these techniques improve the open-domain conversational prowess of encoder-decoder networks by enabling them to produce more natural and emotionally rich responses.
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Available for free at http://crr.ugent.be/archives/1003.
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Asghar, N., Poupart, P., Hoey, J., Jiang, X., Mou, L. (2018). Affective Neural Response Generation. In: Pasi, G., Piwowarski, B., Azzopardi, L., Hanbury, A. (eds) Advances in Information Retrieval. ECIR 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10772. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76941-7_12
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