HIPPL: Hierarchical Intent-Inferring Pointer Network With Pseudo Labeling for Consistent Persona-Driven Dialogue Generation [Research Frontier]

Despite the recent advancements in dialogue systems, persona-driven chatbots are still in their infancy. Previous studies on persona-driven dialogue generation demonstrated its ability in generating responses that contain more detailed persona information. However, the challenge of maintaining persona consistency and contextual coherence still persists in persona-driven dialogue generation. Moreover, current methods have limitations in processing multi-source inputs and identifying interlocutor intents due to the absence of trustworthy labels and effective modeling. Additionally, numerous approaches rely on pre-trained large-scale language models that require costly computational resources. To address these challenges, a lightweight hierarchical intent-inferring pointer network is proposed for multi-source persona-driven dialogue generation. The proposed method involves detecting interlocutor intents in chitchat and utilizing pseudo labeling and natural language inference techniques to generate intent labels. Our model is evaluated on a benchmark dataset PersonaChat. The experimental results show that our model outperforms the strongest baseline by 13.47% and 4.28% in terms of persona consistency and contextual coherence, respectively.