MoCoRP: Modeling Consistent Relations between Persona and Response for Persona-based Dialogue

TL;DR

MoCoRP introduces a framework that explicitly models relations between persona statements and responses using an NLI expert, significantly improving persona consistency and engagement in dialogue systems.

Contribution

It is the first to incorporate explicit NLI-based relations into persona dialogue models, enhancing coherence and persona consistency.

Findings

Outperforms baselines on ConvAI2 and MPChat datasets.

Achieves higher persona consistency and engagement metrics.

Shows qualitative improvements in dialogue coherence.

Abstract

As dialogue systems become increasingly important across various domains, a key challenge in persona-based dialogue is generating engaging and context-specific interactions while ensuring the model acts with a coherent personality. However, existing persona-based dialogue datasets lack explicit relations between persona sentences and responses, which makes it difficult for models to effectively capture persona information. To address these issues, we propose MoCoRP (Modeling Consistent Relations between Persona and Response), a framework that incorporates explicit relations into language models. MoCoRP leverages an NLI expert to explicitly extract the NLI relations between persona sentences and responses, enabling the model to effectively incorporate appropriate persona information from the context into its responses. We applied this framework to pre-trained models like BART and further extended it to modern large language models (LLMs) through alignment tuning. Experimental results on the public datasets ConvAI2 and MPChat demonstrate that MoCoRP outperforms existing baselines, achieving superior persona consistency and engaging, context-aware dialogue generation. Furthermore, our model not only excels in quantitative metrics but also shows significant improvements in qualitative aspects. These results highlight the effectiveness of explicitly modeling persona-response relations in persona-based dialogue. The source codes of MoCoRP are available at https://github.com/DMCB-GIST/MoCoRP.