Personalized Topic Selection Model for Topic-Grounded Dialogue

Recently, the topic-grounded dialogue (TGD) system has become increasingly popular as its powerful capability to actively guide users to accomplish specific tasks through topic-guided conversations. Most existing works utilize side information (e.g., topics or personas) in isolation to enhance the topic selection ability. However, due to disregarding the noise within these auxiliary information sources and their mutual influence, current models tend to predict useruninteresting and contextually irrelevant topics. To build user-engaging and coherent dialogue agent, we propose a Personalized topic sElection model for Topic-grounded Dialogue, named PETD, which takes account of the interaction of side information to selectively aggregate such information for more accurately predicting subsequent topics. Specifically, we evaluate the correlation between global topics and personas and selectively incorporate the global topics aligned with user personas. Furthermore, we propose a contrastive learning based persona selector to filter out irrelevant personas under the constraint of lacking pertinent persona annotations. Throughout the selection and generation, diverse relevant side information is considered. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method can generate engaging and diverse responses, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines across various evaluation metrics. * Corresponding author. 144.8 Q: It's finally a holiday. How do you think I should spend my leisure time? (a) Global topics lead to mainstream but depersonalized topic selection. (b) Irrelevant personas lead to unsmooth topic transition. History topic path: friendship → emotion → humanity Q: I just watched Titanic yesterday. Great love always deserves to be praised. p1: Among all subjects, I especially love physics. p2: I long for pure love. p3: I am a happy person. p4: I like opera. • • • User Profile R: The physics exam is coming up, how are you doing with your revision? R: Why not try camping? You can explore and capture beautiful scenery. R: You can try shopping or watching movies. w/o Persona with Persona R: I completely understand your yearning for love. First love is an unforgettable experience filled with innocence and passion.