Emotional dialog generation via multiple classifiers based on a generative adversarial network

Background: Human-machine dialog generation is an essential topic of research in the field of natural language processing. Generating high-quality, diverse, fluent, and emotional conversation is a challenging task. Based on continuing advancements in artificial intelligence and deep learning, new methods have come to the forefront in recent times. In particular, the end-to-end neural network model provides an extensible conversation generation framework that has the potential to enable machines to understand semantics and automatically generate responses. However, neural network models come with their own set of questions and challenges. The basic conversational model framework tends to produce universal, meaningless, and relatively “safe” answers. Methods: Based on generative adversarial networks (GANs), a new emotional dialog generation framework called EMC-GAN is proposed in this study to address the task of emotional dialog generation. The proposed model comprises a generative and three discriminative models. The generator is based on the basic sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) dialog generation model, and the aggregate discriminative model for the overall framework consists of a basic discriminative model, an emotion discriminative model, and a fluency discriminative model. The basic discriminative model distinguishes generated fake sentences from real sentences in the training corpus. The emotion discriminative model evaluates whether the emotion conveyed via the generated dialog agrees with a pre-specified emotion, and directs the generative model to generate dialogs that correspond to the category of the pre-specified emotion. Finally, the fluency discriminative model assigns a score to the fluency of the generated dialog and guides the generator to produce more fluent sentences. Results: Based on the experimental results, this study confirms the superiority of the proposed model over similar existing models with respect to emotional accuracy, fluency, and consistency. Conclusions: The proposed EMC-GAN model is capable of generating consistent, smooth, and fluent dialog that conveys pre-specified emotions, and exhibits better performance with respect to emotional accuracy, consistency, and fluency compared to its competitors. © 2019 Beijing Zhongke Journal Publishing Co. Ltd