Persona-Based Conversational AI: State of the Art and Challenges

Abstract: Conversational AI has become an increasingly prominent and practical application of machine learning. However, existing conversational AI techniques still suffer from various limitations. One such limitation is a lack of well-developed methods for incorporating auxiliary information that could help a model understand conversational context better. In this paper, we explore how persona-based information could help improve the quality of response generation in conversations. First, we provide a literature review focusing on the current state-of-the-art methods that utilize persona information. We evaluate two strong baseline methods, the Ranking Profile Memory Network and the Poly-Encoder, on the NeurIPS ConvAI2 benchmark dataset. Our analysis elucidates the importance of incorporating persona information into conversational systems. Additionally, our study highlights several limitations with current state-of-the-art methods and outlines challenges and future research directions for advancing personalized conversational AI technology.