Abstract
Generating polite responses is essential to build intelligent and engaging dialogue systems. However, this task is far from well-explored due to the difficulties of rendering a particular style in coherent responses, especially when parallel datasets for regular-to-polite pairs are usually unavailable.
This paper proposes a polite chatbot that can produce responses that are polite and coherent to the given context. In this study, a politeness transfer model is first used to generate polite synthetic dialogue pairs of contexts and polite utterances.
Then, these synthetic pairs are employed to train a dialogue model. Automatic and human evaluations demonstrate that our method outperforms baselines in producing polite dialogue responses while staying competitive in terms of coherent to the given context.