Modeling Personalization in Continuous Space for Response Generation via Augmented Wasserstein Autoencoders

Variational autoencoders (VAEs) and Wasserstein autoencoders (WAEs) have achieved noticeable progress in open-domain response generation. Through introducing latent variables in continuous space, these models are capable of capturing utterance-level semantics, e.g., topic, syntactic properties, and thus can generate informative and diversified responses. In this work, we improve the WAE for response generation. In addition to the utterance-level information, we also model user-level information in latent continue space. Specifically, we embed user-level and utterance-level information into two multimodal distributions, and combine these two multimodal distributions into a mixed distribution. This mixed distribution will be used as the prior distribution of WAE in our proposed model, named as Persona WAE. Experimental results on a large-scale real-world dataset confirm the superiority of our model for generating informative and personalized responses, where both automatic and human evaluations outperform state-of-the-art models.