Developing an emotion-affective open-domain chatbot with positively transitioned sentiment data

In this paper, we describe a data-driven approach for developing Emily, an emotion-affective open-domain chatbot. The proposed data enhancing method can explicitly model positively transitioned (PT) sentiment data from multi-turn dialogues. We construct a dialogue corpus with PT sentiment data and will release it for public use. By fine-tuning a pretrained dialogue model using the produced PT enhanced dialogues, we are able to develop an emotion-affective open-domain chatbot exhibiting close-to-human performance in various emotion-affective metrics. We evaluate Emily against a few state-of-the-art (SOTA) open-domain chatbots and show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.