Enhancing Target-Guided Proactive Dialogue Systems via Conversational Scenario Modeling and Intent-Keyword Bridging

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel approach for target-guided proactive dialogue systems by modeling conversational scenarios and intent keywords, significantly improving their proactivity and naturalness.

Contribution

It proposes joint modeling of user profiles and domain knowledge as scenarios, and intent-keyword bridging for better dialogue guidance, addressing limitations of prior methods.

Findings

Enhanced system proactivity, fluency, and informativeness

Substantial improvements demonstrated through evaluations

Effectiveness of scenario modeling and intent bridging confirmed

Abstract

A target-guided proactive dialogue system aims to steer conversations proactively toward pre-defined targets, such as designated keywords or specific topics. During guided conversations, dynamically modeling conversational scenarios and intent keywords to guide system utterance generation is beneficial; however, existing work largely overlooks this aspect, resulting in a mismatch with the dynamics of real-world conversations. In this paper, we jointly model user profiles and domain knowledge as conversational scenarios to introduce a scenario bias that dynamically influences system utterances, and employ intent-keyword bridging to predict intent keywords for upcoming dialogue turns, providing higher level and more flexible guidance. Extensive automatic and human evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of conversational scenario modeling and intent keyword bridging, yielding substantial improvements in proactivity, fluency, and informativeness for target-guided proactive dialogue systems, thereby narrowing the gap with real world interactions.