CARE : commonsense-aware emotional response generation with latent concepts

Abstract

Rationality and emotion are two fundamental elements of humans. Endowing agents with rationality and emotion has been one of the major milestones in AI. However, in the field of conversational AI, most existing models only specialize in one aspect and neglect the other, which often leads to dull or unrelated responses. In this paper, we hypothesize that combining rationality and emotion into conversational agents can improve response quality. To test the hypothesis, we focus on one fundamental aspect of rationality, i.e., commonsense, and propose CARE, a novel model for commonsense-aware emotional response generation. Specifically, we first propose a framework to learn and construct commonsense-aware emotional latent concepts of the response given an input message and a desired emotion. We then propose three methods to collaboratively incorporate the latent concepts into response generation. Experimental results on two large-scale datasets support our hypothesis and show that our model can produce more accurate and commonsense-aware emotional responses and achieve better human ratings than state-of-the-art models that only specialize in one aspect.AI SingaporeMinistry of Health (MOH)Nanyang Technological UniversityNational Research Foundation (NRF)Accepted versionThis research is supported, in part, by Alibaba Group through Alibaba Innovative Research (AIR) Program and Alibaba-NTU Singapore Joint Research Institute (JRI) (Alibaba-NTU-AIR2019B1), Nanyang Technological Uni- versity, Singapore. This research is also supported, in part, by the National Research Foundation, Prime Minister’s Of- fice, Singapore under its AI Singapore Programme (AISG Award No: AISG-GC-2019-003) and under its NRF Inves- tigatorship Programme (NRFI Award No. NRF-NRFI05- 2019-0002). Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not reflect the views of National Re- search Foundation, Singapore. This research is also sup- ported, in part, by the Singapore Ministry of Health un- der its National Innovation Challenge on Active and Confi- dent Ageing (NIC Project No. MOH/NIC/COG04/2017 and MOH/NIC/HAIG03/2017)