Learning to Customize Language Model for Generation-based dialog systems

Personalized conversation systems have received increasing attention recently. Existing personalized conversation models tend to employ the meta-learning framework that first finds the initial parameters, then fine-tunes on a few personal utterances. However, fine-tuning can only make slight changes to the initial parameters, resulting in similar language models for different users. In this paper, we propose to customize a conversation model with unique network structures for each user. Concretely, we introduce a private network to the language model, whose structure will evolve during training to better capture the unique characteristics of the user. The private network is only trained on the corpora of the corresponding user, and similar users can share partial private structure for data reuse purpose. Experiment results show that our algorithm excels all the baselines in terms of personality, quality, and diversity measurement.