Learning Retrieval Augmentation for Personalized Dialogue Generation

TL;DR

This paper introduces LAPDOG, a retrieval-augmented model that leverages external knowledge to improve personalized dialogue generation by retrieving relevant stories to enrich persona profiles.

Contribution

LAPDOG is a novel retrieval-augmented framework that enhances personalized dialogue generation by integrating external story retrieval with joint training.

Findings

LAPDOG significantly outperforms baseline models on the CONVAI2 dataset.

External knowledge retrieval improves the personalization quality of dialogue responses.

Joint training of retrieval and generation components leads to better performance.

Abstract

Personalized dialogue generation, focusing on generating highly tailored responses by leveraging persona profiles and dialogue context, has gained significant attention in conversational AI applications. However, persona profiles, a prevalent setting in current personalized dialogue datasets, typically composed of merely four to five sentences, may not offer comprehensive descriptions of the persona about the agent, posing a challenge to generate truly personalized dialogues. To handle this problem, we propose $\textbf{L}$earning Retrieval $\textbf{A}$ugmentation for $\textbf{P}$ersonalized $\textbf{D}$ial$\textbf{O}$gue $\textbf{G}$eneration ($\textbf{LAPDOG}$), which studies the potential of leveraging external knowledge for persona dialogue generation. Specifically, the proposed LAPDOG model consists of a story retriever and a dialogue generator. The story retriever uses a given persona profile as queries to retrieve relevant information from the story document, which serves as a supplementary context to augment the persona profile. The dialogue generator utilizes both the dialogue history and the augmented persona profile to generate personalized responses. For optimization, we adopt a joint training framework that collaboratively learns the story retriever and dialogue generator, where the story retriever is optimized towards desired ultimate metrics (e.g., BLEU) to retrieve content for the dialogue generator to generate personalized responses. Experiments conducted on the CONVAI2 dataset with ROCStory as a supplementary data source show that the proposed LAPDOG method substantially outperforms the baselines, indicating the effectiveness of the proposed method. The LAPDOG model code is publicly available for further exploration. https://github.com/hqsiswiliam/LAPDOG