Emily: Developing An Emotion-affective Open-Domain Chatbot with Knowledge Graph-based Persona

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.