Topic Presentation for a Free Conversation System Based on the Web Texts

Abstract

Most recent researches on non-task-oriented conversation system have focused on how to make the user continue the conversation without getting bored or tired. Some studies propose several strategies enriching the expressive forms of the system’s utterances so that the user would not feel monotonous. In this paper, we talk about the significance of presenting topics, and give an approach to provide and control topics for the user in a free conversation system. Specifically, the system extracts topics from the Web texts according to the user’s latest interest automatically, and keeps the conversation going on by providing the fabricated topics to the user. At the same time, the system constantly detects the timing when the user might have lost interests in the current topic, and changes the current topic to another one obtained from a topic website. Experiments and questionnaires show that our method works well.