Personality-affected Emotion Generation in Dialog Systems

Abstract

Generating appropriate emotions for responses is essential for dialog systems to provide human-like interaction in various application scenarios. Most previous dialog systems tried to achieve this goal by learning empathetic manners from anonymous conversational data. However, emotional responses generated by those methods may be inconsistent, which will decrease user engagement and service quality. Psychological findings suggest that the emotional expressions of humans are rooted in personality traits. Therefore, we propose a new task, Personality-affected Emotion Generation, to generate emotion based on the personality given to the dialog system and further investigate a solution through the personality-affected mood transition. Specifically, we first construct a daily dialog dataset, Personality EmotionLines Dataset (PELD), with emotion and personality annotations. Subsequently, we analyze the challenges in this task, i.e., (1) heterogeneously integrating personality and emotional factors and (2) extracting multi-granularity emotional information in the dialog context. Finally, we propose to model the personality as the transition weight by simulating the mood transition process in the dialog system and solve the challenges above. We conduct extensive experiments on PELD for evaluation. Results suggest that by adopting our method, the emotion generation performance is improved by 13% in macro-F1 and 5% in weighted-F1 from the BERT-base model.