Simulated Annealing for Emotional Dialogue Systems

Explicitly modeling emotions in dialogue generation has important applications, such as building empathetic personal companions. In this study, we consider the task of expressing a specific emotion for dialogue generation. Previous approaches take the emotion as a training signal, which may be ignored during inference. Here, we propose a search-based emotional dialogue system by simulated annealing (SA). Specifically, we first define a scoring function that combines contextual coherence and emotional correctness. Then, SA iteratively edits a general response, and search for a generation with a high score. In this way, we enforce the presence of the desired emotion. We evaluate our system on the NLPCC2017 dataset. The proposed method shows about 12% improvements in emotion accuracy compared with the previous state-of-the-art method, without hurting the generation quality (measured by BLEU).