Abstract:In this paper, we describe a data enhancement method for developing Emily, an emotion-affective open-domain chatbot. The proposed method is based on explicitly modeling positively transitioned (PT) sentiment data from multi-turn dialogues. We construct a dialogue corpus with PT sentiment data and will release it for public use. By fine-tuning a pretrained dialogue model using the produced PT-enhanced dialogues, we are able to develop an emotion-affective open-domain chatbot exhibiting close-to-human performance in various emotion-affective metrics. We evaluate Emily against a few state-of-the-art (SOTA) open-domain chatbots and show the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The corpus is made publicly available.
Abstract:In this paper, we describe approaches for developing Emily, an emotion-affective open-domain chatbot. Emily can perceive a user's negative emotion state and offer supports by positively converting the user's emotion states. This is done by finetuning a pretrained dialogue model upon data capturing dialogue contexts and desirable emotion states transition across turns. Emily can differentiate a general open-domain dialogue utterance with questions relating to personal information. By leveraging a question-answering approach based on knowledge graphs to handle personal information, Emily maintains personality consistency. We evaluate Emily against a few state-of-the-art open-domain chatbots and show the effects of the proposed approaches in emotion affecting and addressing personality inconsistency.