"Love is as Complex as Math": Metaphor Generation System for Social Chatbot

TL;DR

This paper presents a metaphor generation system for social chatbots that creates topic-aware figurative language, enhancing user engagement and making conversations more human-like and emotionally expressive.

Contribution

It introduces a novel metaphor generation framework integrated into chatbots, enabling the use of figurative language to improve conversational engagement.

Findings

Metaphor use significantly increases conversation length.

Human annotators validate the novelty and appropriateness of generated metaphors.

The system effectively arouses user interest in chatbot interactions.

Abstract

As the wide adoption of intelligent chatbot in human daily life, user demands for such systems evolve from basic task-solving conversations to more casual and friend-like communication. To meet the user needs and build emotional bond with users, it is essential for social chatbots to incorporate more human-like and advanced linguistic features. In this paper, we investigate the usage of a commonly used rhetorical device by human -- metaphor for social chatbot. Our work first designs a metaphor generation framework, which generates topic-aware and novel figurative sentences. By embedding the framework into a chatbot system, we then enables the chatbot to communicate with users using figurative language. Human annotators validate the novelty and properness of the generated metaphors. More importantly, we evaluate the effects of employing metaphors in human-chatbot conversations. Experiments indicate that our system effectively arouses user interests in communicating with our chatbot, resulting in significantly longer human-chatbot conversations.