Put Chatbot into Its Interlocutor's Shoes: New Framework to Learn Chatbot Responding with Intention

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel framework for training chatbots to adopt human-like intentions, enabling them to influence interlocutor responses in a more human-like and purposeful manner.

Contribution

It presents a new framework with a guiding chatbot and interlocutor model to teach chatbots to respond with specific intentions, enhancing their human-like interaction capabilities.

Findings

Framework demonstrates flexibility across different intentions.

Guiding chatbot effectively influences human interlocutor responses.

Experimental results show improved performance metrics.

Abstract

Most chatbot literature that focuses on improving the fluency and coherence of a chatbot, is dedicated to making chatbots more human-like. However, very little work delves into what really separates humans from chatbots -- humans intrinsically understand the effect their responses have on the interlocutor and often respond with an intention such as proposing an optimistic view to make the interlocutor feel better. This paper proposes an innovative framework to train chatbots to possess human-like intentions. Our framework includes a guiding chatbot and an interlocutor model that plays the role of humans. The guiding chatbot is assigned an intention and learns to induce the interlocutor to reply with responses matching the intention, for example, long responses, joyful responses, responses with specific words, etc. We examined our framework using three experimental setups and evaluated the guiding chatbot with four different metrics to demonstrate flexibility and performance advantages. Additionally, we performed trials with human interlocutors to substantiate the guiding chatbot's effectiveness in influencing the responses of humans to a certain extent. Code will be made available to the public.