An Equal-Size Hard EM Algorithm for Diverse Dialogue Generation

Open-domain dialogue systems aim to interact with humans through natural language texts in an open-ended fashion. However, the widely successful neural networks may not work well for dialogue systems, as they tend to generate generic responses. In this work, we propose an Equal-size Hard Expectation–Maximization (EqHard-EM) algorithm to train a multi-decoder model for diverse dialogue generation. Our algorithm assigns a sample to a decoder in a hard manner and additionally imposes an equal-assignment constraint to ensure that all decoders are well-trained. We provide detailed theoretical analysis to justify our approach. Further, experiments on two large-scale, open-domain dialogue datasets verify that our EqHard-EM algorithm generates high-quality diverse responses.