Elastic Responding Machine for Dialog Generation with Dynamically Mechanism Selecting

Neural models aiming at generating meaningful and diverse response is attracting increasing attention over recent years. For a given post, the conventional encoder-decoder models tend to learn high-frequency but trivial responses, or are difficult to determine which speaking styles are suitable to generate responses. To address this issue, we propose the elastic responding machine (ERM), which is based on a proposed encoder-diverter-filter-decoder framework. ERM models the multiple responding mechanisms to not only generate acceptable responses for a given post but also improve the diversity of responses. Here, the mechanisms could be regraded as some latent variables, and for a given post different responses may be generated by different mechanisms. The experiments demonstrate the quality and diversity of the generated responses, intuitively show how the learned model controls response mechanism when responding, and reveal some underlying relationship between mechanism and language style.