A Non-Task-Oriented Dialogue System Controlling the Utterance Length

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a non-task-oriented dialogue system controlling the utterance length. The dialogue system can be classified into a task-oriented dialogue system or a non-task-oriented dialogue system. Recently, demand for the non-task-oriented dialogue system is increasing. The utterance length is one of the important information in a dialogue system. In general, our utterance length tends to be long when we are speakers. On the other hand, the length of our utterance tends to be short when we are listeners. In addition, the utterance length differs from person to person, so we change our utterance length for friendly communication. The effect of the utterance length has never considered in dialogue systems using Encoder-Decoder model. Therefore, we propose an utterance length estimator (ULE) and an index of the utterance length. ULE is a neural network which learns the utterance length by training data of dialogue. The index of the utterance length is the parameter considers user's personality and it is calculated during dialogue. Our dialogue system decides the length of system's utterance by ULE and index of the utterance length, and generates output sequences by using a neural encoder-decoder controlling output length. Experimental results show our system can decide the appropriate length of the utterance and makes users more satisfied than the conventional method.