Abstract:
A recent topic of research in natural language generation has been the development of automatic response generation modules that can automatically respond to a user’s utterance in an empathetic manner. Previous research has tackled this task using neural generative methods by augmenting emotion classes with the input sequences. However, the outputs by these models may be inconsistent. We employ multi-task learning to predict the emotion label and to generate a viable response for a given utterance using a common encoder with multiple decoders. Our proposed encoder-decoder model consists of a self-attention based encoder and a decoder with dot product attention mechanism to generate response with a specified emotion. We use the focal loss to handle imbalanced data distribution, and utilize the consistency loss to allow coherent decoding by the decoders. Human evaluation reveals that our model produces more emotionally pertinent responses. In addition, our model outperforms multiple strong baselines on automatic evaluation measures such as F1 and BLEU scores, thus resulting in more fluent and adequate responses.
