Content-Oriented User Modeling for Personalized Response Ranking in Chatbots

Automatic chatbots (also known as chat-agents) have attracted much attention from both researching and industrial fields. Generally, the semantic relevance between users’ queries and the corresponding responses is considered as the essential element for conversation modeling in both generation and ranking based chat systems. By contrast, it is a nontrivial task to adopt the users’ information, such as preference, social role, etc., into conversational models reasonably, while users’ profiles play a significant role in the procedure of conversations by providing the implicit contexts. This paper aims to address the personalized response ranking task by incorporating user profiles into the conversation model. In our approach, users’ personalized representations are latently learned from the contents posted by them via a two-branch neural network. After that, a deep neural network architecture is further presented to learn the fusion representation of posts, responses, and personal information. In this way, the proposed model could understand conversations from the users’ perspective; hence, the more appropriate responses are selected for a specified person. The experimental results on two datasets from social network services demonstrate that our approach is hopeful to represent users’ personal information implicitly based on user generated contents, and it is promising to perform as an important component in chatbots to select the personalized responses for each user.