Topic control in a free conversation system

Abstract

Conversation systems can be divided into two types. Task-oriented ones and non-task-oriented ones. Most recent researches on the latter one have focused on how to make the user continue the conversation without getting bored or tired. Some studies propose several ways to enrich the expressive forms of words or sentences. Others make efforts on topic association. Both solutions try to preserve the conversation interesting so that the user would like to continue talking with the computer. In this paper, we talk about the significance of providing topics, and give an approach to provide and control topics for a free conversation system. Specifically, the system extracts topics from the Web according to the user's interest automatically, and keeps the conversation going on by providing the fabricated topics to the user. Also the system constantly detects the timing when the user might have lost interests in the current topic, and then changes the topic to another one obtained from a topic website. Experiments and questionnaires show that our method works well.