P5: Plug-and-Play Persona Prompting for Personalized Response Selection

TL;DR

This paper introduces a plug-and-play persona prompting method for chatbots that enhances personalized response selection, performs well in zero-shot settings, and reduces the need for expensive persona-grounded data.

Contribution

It presents the first prompt-based approach for personalized response selection, enabling zero-shot and fine-tuned improvements without extensive persona-grounded training data.

Findings

Zero-shot model improved persona response scores by 7.71 and 1.04 points.

Fine-tuned model outperformed previous state-of-the-art by 1.95 and 3.39 points.

Method reduces dependence on costly persona-grounded corpora.

Abstract

The use of persona-grounded retrieval-based chatbots is crucial for personalized conversations, but there are several challenges that need to be addressed. 1) In general, collecting persona-grounded corpus is very expensive. 2) The chatbot system does not always respond in consideration of persona at real applications. To address these challenges, we propose a plug-and-play persona prompting method. Our system can function as a standard open-domain chatbot if persona information is not available. We demonstrate that this approach performs well in the zero-shot setting, which reduces the dependence on persona-ground training data. This makes it easier to expand the system to other languages without the need to build a persona-grounded corpus. Additionally, our model can be fine-tuned for even better performance. In our experiments, the zero-shot model improved the standard model by 7.71 and 1.04 points in the original persona and revised persona, respectively. The fine-tuned model improved the previous state-of-the-art system by 1.95 and 3.39 points in the original persona and revised persona, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to solve the problem of personalized response selection using prompt sequences. Our code is available on github~\footnote{https://github.com/rungjoo/plug-and-play-prompt-persona}.