Natural Language Processing Research

2.1. Encoder-Decoder Framework-Based Methods

Sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) model [8,9] builds a great foundation for neural dialogue generation methods. It introduces the Encoder-Decoder framework, and leads to a novel solution for the dialogue generation task. Figure 1 is a general illustration of an Encoder-Decoder framework.

Figure 1

An illustration of the Encoder-Decoder framework.

Source: Chen et al. [10].

In the case of applying this framework, the encoder encodes the source sequence X, a sequence with T tokens concatenated by message and contexts sentences, into a semantic context vector Context. Given the Context and a response sequence Y of length T', the decoder maximizes the generation probability of Y conditioned on Context: p(Y|Context).

This Encoder-Decoder framework is the most popular, universal, and basic framework for neural dialogue generation task. Its expansibility is very well, thus resulting in that most existing and novel neural dialogue generation methods are based on this framework. Table 1 shows the summary of these existing methods.

We dive into these existing Encoder-Decoder framework-based methods and divide them into three classifications, which are showed as follows:

1. Adding the external semantic information to control the generating process.

   These methods are simple, which is easy to be thought and implemented. However, these methods also have certain restrictions on the corpus. In addition, some methods also lack the potential for continued research. Meanwhile, the functions for handling the external information are difficult to be changed essentially.

   Persona information: Li et al. [11] used persona information to solve the problem of inconsistent response in multi-turn dialogue. However, it only considers the consistency that using different expression but getting the consistent personal information, such as name, address, country, and so on. Moreover, it didn't consider the influence of the dialogue history.

   Cue word information: Yao et al. [12] introduced the cue word information to improve the general Seq2Seq model. They proposed a cue word gate recurrent unit to extract the cue word information, and a hierarchical gated fusion unit to fuse this auxiliary information and the general decoding.

   Textual knowledge: Ghazvininejad et al. [13] added an encoder to encode the fact message, which could help decoder generate meaningful and proper responses. However, the complexity of this method increases with the increase of knowledge.

   Emotion information: Huber et al. [14] introduced emotion information to help dialogue models learn to express emotion when generating a response. They capture the emotion information from the images, including the visual sentiment, facial expression, and scene features. It is the first image-grounded dialogue agent.

   Specificity level: Zhang et al. [16] proposed the Specificity-based Generation model to deal with the specificity of different utterance-response relations. This module characterized the specificity of the response, which can guide the model to generate responses with different specificities according to different specificity requirements. See et al. [19] proposed two controllable neural text generation methods: conditional training and weighted decoding, which controls four important low-level attributes (repetitiveness, specificity, relevance, and question-answer) that affect the quality of a conversation. Those attributes determine whether the response is simple or specific, whether the topic is continues or changes and whether the sentence is a question or answer. Their model achieved the same effect as the giant GPT on some metrics.

   Multimodal Information: Le et al. [18] proposed the Multimodal Transformer Networks (MTN) to model video information, including image, audio, and text (e.g., subtitles). They employed a single Transformer encoder to encode the text information, and utilized a sliding window of n frames and a linear layer to extract video features. Meditskos et al. [22] presented a framework for the semantic enrichment and interpretation of communication modalities in dialogue-based interfaces.

2. Using attention mechanism to construct connections between contexts and generated responses.

   The attention mechanism is a good technique for constructing the connections between contexts and responses. It also can show a post hoc analysis for the decoding process. However, the current research on attention mechanism is relatively complete, and the innovative work in this research direction is difficult to appear.

   Normal attention mechanism: Introduced by Bahdanau et al. [24] to address the dull responses problem. The idea of attention mechanism is that each token in the response Y relays on a different context vector Context.

   Self-attention: This method was proposed by Vaswani et al. [25] to learn good word vector representations, which is better for natural language understand. Its idea is using other words of the same sentence to recompute the vector representation of one word. This method is widely used in pretraining models.

   Multi-head attention: Tao et al. [15] proposed a Constrained Multi-head attention mechanism. They forced the different head attend to different semantics of the same context sentence through a penalty term.

3. Introducing other novel techniques to assist dialogue models.

   These methods always borrow some new research theory and techniques from other field, and change them suitable for dialogue generation task. In general, some methods can easily attract the attention of other researchers. Here are only some novel Encoder-Decoder-based methods that have not yet formed a trend in recent years. As for {HRED, VAE, RL, GAN, and pretraining models}-based methods, we will discuss them in the following sections.

   Two-steps generation: Ko et al. [17] proposes a Seq2Seq model with attention mechanism. The first part of this model introduced several specificity information during the decoding process to generate responses with different level of specificity. The second component of this model utilized a reordering method based on four external classifiers to increase the semantic rationality of the generated responses. The results of this method are highly depending on the effect of the generation process. Although the ordering process could select rational responses, it doesn't affect the generative capacity.

   Novel training framework: He and Glass [21] proposes a new framework named “Negative Training” to address the malicious and frequent responses problem. This framework has two steps: 1) extracting input-output pair exhibits some undesirable behavior (e.g., malicious or frequent responses) and 2) using these pairs as the negative training examples to fine-tune the model to minimize the model exhibiting bad decoding behavior. They utilized a Seq2Seq model and a training trick of RL structure (i.e., log derivative trick) to implement this framework.

   Contrastive learning: Recently, the contrastive learning method has attracted much attention in the field of Computer Vision, such as MoCo [26], SimCLR [27], and MoCo v2 [28]. Cai et al. [20] introduced contrastive learning into dialogue generation, where the model explicitly perceives the difference between the well-chosen positive and negative utterances.

   Data enhancement: Su et al. [23] selected appropriate responses from nonconversational materials to expand the real corpus collection, which effectively improves the diversity of generated responses. This result of the conversion process has a great influence on the generated response.

2.2. HRED-Based Methods

Since the contexts are not effectively utilized in the general Encoder-Decoder framework, Serban et al. [29] introduced the HRED model [30] into dialogue generation task. The difference between Encoder-Decoder framework is that the HRED's encoder consists of two RNNs: one is the token-level RNN and the other one is sentence-level context RNN. A general illustration of encoder in HRED structure is given in Figure 2.

Figure 2

An illustration of Hierarchical Recurrent Encoder-Decoder (HRED) structure.

Source: Serban et al. [29].

HRED treats a complete dialogue D as a sequence of utterances U1,U2,…,UK−1,UK,UK+1. The U1,U2,…,UK−1 represents the contexts set, UK represents the message, and the UK+1 represents the response. The token-level RNN model maps each utterance to obtain the final hidden state as the token-level vector. The sentence-level context RNN processes iteratively each token-level vector to understand the semantics of the dialogue. After this processing, the sentence-level context RNN model obtained the hidden states to represent a summary of the dialogue history U1,U2,…,UK−1,UK, which can rationally handle the longer dialogue history.

HRED is based on Encoder-Decoder framework. The basic HRED is proposed to rationally utilize the dialogue history information to improve the quality of generated responses. Therefore, it is usually used to handle the multi-turn dialogues. In general, most Encoder-Decoder-based methods could replace their framework with the HRED when their targets are changed as multi-turn dialogues. Here we only review some novel methods based on HRED, e.g., WSeq, hierarchical recurrent attention network (HRAN), and ReCoSa. Table 2 shows the summary of these methods.

HRED: The context RNN of HRED encodes the obtained word-level vector which will take advantage of the historical information of the conversation in decoding and generating responses. The purpose of the context RNN is that conducting conversations based on the same conversation background (e.g., topics and concepts), so as to produce meaningful conversations. However, the improvement of HRED over the standard Seq2Seq model is not obvious.

WSeq: Tian et al. [31] analyze how to use context effectively through conducting empirical researches to compare various models. Meanwhile, they proposed a variant model named WSeq, which explicitly weights the context vector through context query relevance, and its effect exceeds other benchmark methods.

HRAN: The previous HRED methods pay less attention to the fact that the importance of words and utterances in the context are different. Xing et al. [32] proposed a HRAN to attends to important parts within and among utterance-level attention respectively.

ReCoSa: Zhang et al. [33] thought a response is always relevant with a few contexts. However, the HRED treats all contexts indiscriminately, which disturbs the generation process. Therefore, they proposed the ReCoSa model based on HRED and self-attention mechanism.

2.3. VAE-Based Methods

In order to generate diverse responses, the VAE [34] was introduced to Encoder-Decoder framework (or HRED). The VAE is a generative model based on a standard autoencoder structure and KL divergence. Figure 3 is a general illustration of VAE model.

Figure 3

An illustration of the Variational AutoEncoder (VAE) model.

Source: Bowman et al. [34].

The VAE samples the latent variable Z from a prior probability distribution (e.g., standard Gaussian (μ=0→,σ=1→)). Then, VAE models learn a posterior recognition model qZ|X to replace the deterministic function of autoencoder models. This qZ|X is an approximate posterior distribution over Z (e.g., diagonal Gaussian) conditioned on X. Intuitively, the VAE models does not learn the codes as a single point, but as a soft over region in the latent space. When the VAE models encoding the input data into latent variables, rather than taking the input data as independent with each other, they consider the relationships among the input data. Therefore, the latent variables contain certain correlations between each other, which has been proved in Ref. [34]. Therefore, VAE models force the codes to fill the latent space instead of storing the data as an isolated code.

The VAE introduces latent variables to model the implicit semantic information, and gets well results, which attracts many researches to study the latent variables. The methods based on VAE have achieved good results on diversity metrics. However, according to the Ref. [40], the latent variables may cause incoherent and irrelevant responses. Here we review some dialogue generation methods based on VAE. Table 3 shows the summary of these methods.

VAE+HRED: Serban et al. [35] proposed the VHRED model, which is based on the HRED structure and employs a variational module to sample latent variables. They sample the latent variable through the context vector calculated by context-level RNN, which could capture the global semantics. Based on the VHRED model, Chen et al. [38] introduced the memory network and proposed VHMN model. They utilized the memory network to record the dialogue history information, and then designed the variational memory reading mechanism to build the context vectors.

Conditional-VAE: Zhao et al. [37] proposed a knowledge-guided conditional-VAE (kgCVAE) to utilize dialogue act messages for restraining the latent variables, which improves model effectiveness and interpretability. Meanwhile, they also proposed a new training trick named bag-of-word-loss to solve the vanishing latent variable problem [34]. Shen et al. [36] also proposed a conditional-VAE(CVAE) model named SPHRED. They designed two status-RNN to encode speaker information and utilize the utterance label to restrict the sampled latent variables. They constructed a classifier to predict the label for the utterance without any labels. Gao et al. [39] proposed a discrete CVAE model, which introduces a discrete latent variable with an explicit semantic meaning to improve the general CVAE on dialogue generation task. They proposed a two-stage sampling approach to enable efficient diverse variable selection from a large latent space assumed in the dialogue generation task.

SPACEFUSION: In order to address the irrelevant responses problem caused by random sampled latent variables, Gao et al. [40] proposed a joint optimized model named SPACEFUSION. They utilized multi-task training framework to train a Seq2Seq model and an autoencoder, and then designed an interpolation term to implement the fusion process of the two latent space of Seq2Seq and autoencoder.

2.4. RL-Based Methods

Also, in order to generate diverse responses on multi-turn dialogue generation task, the RL method chose another solution. The RL method focuses on the optimization process. Li et al. [41] thought the Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) is sensitive to high-frequency sentences, thus resulting in safe responses with less information. Therefore, they introduced RL algorithm and designed reward functions to replace the MLE process.

RL algorithm is widely used in goal-oriented dialogue task [42–45], which shows the potential for improving response quality in open-domain dialogue generation task. Here we only review some RL grounded methods on open-domain dialogue generation task. Table 4 shows the summary of these methods.

RL: Li et al. [41] introduced RL into dialogue generation task. They focused on the design of the reward function. They illustrated that “ease of answering,” “information flow,” and “semantic coherence” are three main factors that could promote the success of a dialog. Then, they proposed the approximate reward functions to model the three factors.

PRGDDA: Yang et al. [46] proposed a RL grounded method named Personalized Response Generation by Dual-learning-based Domain Adaptation (PRGDDA). They first trained a generative model through a large dataset without persona information, and then fine-tuned the model with a small size personalized data by using dual-learning mechanism.

Seq2SeqCo-{bi, MP, dual}: Zhang et al. [47] thought the reason that Seq2Seq always generates the dull responses is the optimization function equals the Kullback–Leibler divergence. Therefore, they replaced the original optimization function with the coherence score. They proposed three models i.e., GRU Bilinear (bi), MatchPyramid (MP), and Dual-Learning Architecture (dual), to calculate the three coherence scores, respectively.

Multiple-Response-Generation-Model: Gao et al. [48] proposed a response generation model to generate multiple diverse responses simultaneously. Their model considered a set of responses jointly, and contained a latent word inference network to sample a discrete word that related with the context and response. They utilize the RL algorithm to optimize their model.

P² BOT: Based on the RL algorithm, Liu et al. [49] introduced mutual persona perception and proposed a transmitter-receiver framework to explicitly model the interaction between participators of one conversation. This method focuses on the personalized dialogue generation.

2.5. GAN-Based Methods

Since the GAN could not effectively handle the discrete sequence [50], it is hard to obtain a good result through GAN for dialogue generation task. To address this problem, Yu et al. [50] and Li et al. [51] introduced policy gradient method, and Xu et al. [52] proposed an approximate embedding layer to help GAN handle the discrete situation.

After this, many novel GAN based generation methods have been proposed, such as MaskGAN [53], DP-GAN [54], Adver-REGS [51], GAN-AEL [52], Adversarial Information Maximization (AIM) [55], DialogWAE [56], and Posterior-GAN [57]. Here we only review some GAN grounded methods for dialogue generation task. Table 5 shows the summary of these methods.

Adver-REGS: To improve the performance of GAN on dialogue generation task, Li et al. [51] employed the policy gradient algorithm of RL method. They proposed rewards for every generation step (REGS) to solve the disadvantage that the expectation of rewards is approximated through only one sample, and the reward is used for all actions. They proposed two strategies to compute each step reward: (1) Monte Carlo search; (2) training discriminator to assign rewards for partially decoding sentences.

GAN-AEL: Xu et al. [52] proposed an approximate embedding layer to replace the sample process, which makes the adversarial training process become a derivable process. This method alleviates the instability problem when using RL training algorithm to a certain extent.

AIM: Zhang et al. [55] proposed an embedding-based structured discriminator and developed AIM model to generate informative and diverse responses.

Dialog-WAE: Gu et al. [56] used GANs to train potential distributions. It used a neural network to generate context-dependent random “noise” that is sampled from the prior and posterior distributions of potential variables, and minimized the Wasserstein distance between the two distributions. Then, a Gaussian mixture prior network is used to enrich the latent space.

Posterior-GAN: Feng et al. [57] proposed a novel posterior adversarial learning framework to utilize the future dialogue information. They reconstructed the original multi-turn dialogue dataset, i.e., replacing the original query-response pairs to the query-response-future triples. They also proposed two Encoder-Decoder-based discriminators (i.e., a forward discriminator and a backward discriminator) to cooperatively discriminate the coherence and informativeness of the generated response through query and future information, respectively.

2.6. Pretraining-Model-Based Methods

In recent years, the pretraining models have a huge impact in the field of natural language understanding and natural language generation. Mehri et al. [58] studied the sentence representation based on the pretraining models and employed the pretrained representation in dialogue generation task. They proved that the pretraining model can be utilized in open-dialogue generation task. Some works employ pretraining models to construct dialogue systems, such as DialoGPT [59], Blender [60], Meena [61], and Plato-2 [62]. However, due to the huge cost of training a pretraining model for open-domain dialogue generation task, it is not suitable for the individual researchers. Table 6 shows the summary of these methods.

DialoGPT: Zhang et al. [59] proposed a large tunable dialogue model named DialoGPT that based on the GPT-2 model [63]. They also introduced the Maximum Mutual Information (MMI) to address the dull responses problem.

Blender: Roller et al. [60] proposed a large-scale dialogue model named Blender. To further analyze the effectiveness of their methods, they build variants of this model with 90M, 2.7B, and 9.4B parameters. They introduced the Blended Skill Talk (BST) to help Blender learn the conversation skills: (1) providing fascinating viewpoints; (2) listening carefully to their partner; (3) demonstrating knowledge, empathy, and personality at the right time; (4) keeping their personality consistent.

Meena: Adiwardana et al. [61] proposed an open-domain chatbot named Meena that has a single evolved transformer [64] encoder and 13 Evolved Transformer decoder. They train the best model for 30 days on a TPUv3 Pod (2,048 TPU cores) on the Meena dataset containing 40B words (or 61B BPE tokens).

PLATO-2: Bao et al. [62] proposed a dialogue model named PLATO-2. They introduced curriculum learning framework to training the latent variable of PLATO-2. The PLATO-2 employed the unified network architecture and contained two parts models in Chinese and English. The Chinese model was trained on the 1.2B Chinese open-domain multi-turn dialogue corpus, while the English model was trained on the 700M English open-domain multi-turn corpus. They train their model for 3 weeks on 64 Nvidia V100.

2.7. Comparison of Different Categories of Methods

Many neural dialogue generation methods have been proposed in recent years. Taking a panoramic view of these approaches, we roughly divide them into six categories that has shown above. However, their basic researches have strong relationship between each other. The earliest Encoder-Decoder framework-based dialogue generation method was migrated from machine translation field and widely called as Seq2Seq model. Due to the limitation of the Seq2Seq on handling dialogue history, the HRED model was proposed. Since both Seq2Seq and HRED were difficult to consider the latent information that hiding in the dialogue, The VAE model was proposed, which generated diverse responses through sampled latent variables. The RL employed two Seq2Seq-agents to simulate the dialogue, and designed the reward functions to achieve the optimize these two agents. Therefore, the agent of RL often generates purposeful and consistent responses, which is more suitable for task-oriented dialogue generation task. The application of RL pushed the GAN into the open-domain dialogue generation task. Aiming at the problem that the traditional GAN is hardly trained by the discrete output, Li et al. [51] introduced the policy gradient method, which effectively address the problem. As for the pretraining models, it can be traced to the transformer model, which is also based on the Encoder-Decoder framework.

Based on these basic models of each category, many novel and effective methods are proposed in recent years. At present, many studies currently focus on different motivations and uses different datasets and different evaluation metrics, thus resulting in the difficulty of doing specific comparison results. Therefore, we evaluated and analyzed the results of each method and gave a simple comparison under as objective conditions as possible.

In general, the Seq2Seq without the attention mechanism, a simple conversation model based on Encoder-Decoder framework, is the worst-performing neural generative model. It often generates “safe reply” which lacking diversity, informativeness, relevance, consistency, and coherence. On the opposite, the pre-training-model-based methods can get the-state-of-the-art performance in general dialogue generation task. However, it is not proper for individual researchers because it costs too much. Besides the pretraining-model-based methods, the five remaining categories of methods are all research hotspots for most researchers of NLP field.

During the past few years, researchers always focused on the diversity, informativeness, relevance, consistency, and coherence of the generated responses, and proposed many novel methods. Since the basic Seq2Seq model often generates safe and dull responses, some researchers introduced the attention mechanism to learn the semantic relationships between contexts and responses, some researchers utilized the external semantic information to assistant in generating dialogue responses, and some researchers proposed the HRED model to handle the dialogue history when generating responses. HRED, the foundational method of the HRED-based methods, adds sentence-level RNN to the Seq2Seq model, and is mainly used for processing the multi-turn dialogues. Since HRED can extract the context vector from the dialogue history, the responses will be generated to make the dialogue continue. However, experiments show that the HRED does not significantly improve the evaluation results, and it is only slightly better than the Seq2Seq with attention.

After a short while, some researchers introduced the latent variables to model the hidden information of dialogue because a good response often not only related to the dialogue history but also to the hidden information that out of the dialogue. The CVAE, a foundational method of VAE-based dialogue generation methods, significantly increases the diversity and informativeness of generated responses through introducing the latent variable sampled from a Gaussian distribution. However, the sampled latent variables also cause incoherent and irrelevant responses. Therefore, the subsequent works are mainly focusing on improving the relevance and coherence of responses while maintaining the good diversity and informativeness.

With the development of the theories and techniques of deep learning field, some new methods could be transferred to dialogue generation task (e.g., RL method). Since the RL is often used for achieving some goals, it is suitable for multi-turn dialogue generation task, which needs purposed and consistent responses. Therefore, the RL-based methods can easily generate coherent responses. Moreover, the RL-based methods can design multiple reward functions for different targets. However, training the RL-based methods is difficult, so some works were proposed to increase the stability of training the RL-based methods.

Another famous deep learning technique, the GAN, also draws much attentions for dialogue generation task. The GAN-based methods reduce safe and general responses and increase the diversity, informativeness, relevance, consistency, and coherence of responses through changing optimization algorithm (e.g., Adver-REGS [51]) or designing novel discriminators (e.g. DP-GAN [54]). Whereas, same with the RL-based methods, the GAN-based methods are also difficult to train.

In summary, for these five foci of interesting in research, the GAN-based methods generally have the best performance among the remaining five categories. The performance of RL-based methods are slightly weak than GAN-based methods, but better than the VAE-based methods in general. The performance of VAE-based methods reach a middle stage of the remaining five categories. Although the diversity and informativeness of VAE-based methods are much the same as GAN-based and RL-based methods in sometimes, the relevance and coherence of VAE-based methods are weak than both RL-based and GAN-based methods. The performance of HRED-based methods are generally weak than GAN, RL, and VAE-based methods, but better than Seq2Seq models.

Although the Seq2Seq model generally has the worst performance, its research value is not small. In recent two years, many researchers proposed novel methods to improve the Seq2Seq model and enriched the Encoder-Decoder framework-based methods on other interesting targets. For example, See et al. [19] focused on controlling the responses generation through low-level attributes. He and Glass [21] focused on addressing the malicious and frequent responses problem, Su et al. [23] focused on enhancing the dialogue dataset. These methods generally have the state-of-the-art results on their targets.

3.1. Dialog Datasets

The dialogue corpus promotes the development of the automatic dialogue system. With the development of the Internet, the form of communication between people has gradually shifted from simple face-to-face to major Internet social platforms, such as Sina-Weibo, Douban, Facebook, Twitter, etc. This transformation has allowed conversations to be stored on social platforms in the form of text, voice, and even video. The single-turn and multi-turn dialogue resources accumulated in social platforms provide quantities of corpus for the research of dialogue systems, and also make the construction of automatic dialogue systems feasible. What is more critical is that the dialogue rules and modes contained in real dialogue resources will promote the research of dialogue systems. Table 7 shows several dialogue corpuses, including OpenSubtitles,¹ CornellMovie,² sina-weibo, Ubuntu,³ DailyDialog,⁴ DoubanConversationCorpus,⁵ PersonaChat,⁶ and STC-SeFun. In addition, we have also sorted out two multi-modal data sets, namely MUStARD⁷ and CH-SIMS.⁸ Although they are not standard dialog data, they can be processed into dialog data for dialog generation.

3.2. Evaluation Metrics

The basic technology of the generative dialogue system originates from the task of machine translation. Therefore, the evaluation metrics of the generative dialogue systems also inherit the evaluation metrics of machine translation field such as BLEU [76]. In addition, the relevance between responses and user's messages is an important issue of dialogue systems, so some relevance evaluation indicators between texts (such as the word vector-based relevance measurement method) are also introduced into the dialogue evaluation process. However, the evaluation object of these indicators is a single round of dialog, and the dialogue is a continuous multi-round process, so the quality of a single round dialogue cannot reflect the overall performance of the dialogue system, especially for the purpose of communication. Table 8 shows some general auto-evaluation metrics.

Generally speaking, the Perplexity metric is used for evaluating the convergent degree of the dialogue systems. Bleu and Embedding-based metrics can reflect the Relevance of the response and the context to a certain extent. Distinct metric is widely utilized to represent the Diversity of the generated responses. Coherence is the metric to evaluate the coherence of response and context. As for the Informativeness and Consistency are usually evaluated by human evaluation.

Recently, the research of automatic evaluation of open-domain dialogue generation draws much attention. Pang et al. [80] proposed that using the GPT-2 model as the standard to automatically measure the quality of the generated responses, including context coherency, response fluency and diversity, and logical self-consistency. Mehri and Eskenazi [81] proposed an unsupervised automatic evaluation method with less references. They used RoBERTa to automatically measure the quality of the generated responses, and found the results have a high correlation with the effect of human evaluation.