{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/bok-introducing-bag-of-keywords-loss-for","title":"BoK: Introducing Bag-of-Keywords Loss for Interpretable Dialogue Response Generation","arxiv_id":"2501.10328","date":"2025-01-17","proceeding":null,"authors":["Suvodip Dey","Maunendra Sankar Desarkar"],"abstract":"The standard language modeling (LM) loss by itself has been shown to be inadequate for effective dialogue modeling. As a result, various training approaches, such as auxiliary loss functions and leveraging human feedback, are being adopted to enrich open-domain dialogue systems. One such auxiliary loss function is Bag-of-Words (BoW) loss, defined as the cross-entropy loss for predicting all the words/tokens of the next utterance. In this work, we propose a novel auxiliary loss named Bag-of-Keywords (BoK) loss to capture the central thought of the response through keyword prediction and leverage it to enhance the generation of meaningful and interpretable responses in open-domain dialogue systems. BoK loss upgrades the BoW loss by predicting only the keywords or critical words/tokens of the next utterance, intending to estimate the core idea rather than the entire response. We incorporate BoK loss in both encoder-decoder (T5) and decoder-only (DialoGPT) architecture and train the models to minimize the weighted sum of BoK and LM (BoK-LM) loss. We perform our experiments on two popular open-domain dialogue datasets, DailyDialog and Persona-Chat. We show that the inclusion of BoK loss improves the dialogue generation of backbone models while also enabling post-hoc interpretability. We also study the effectiveness of BoK-LM loss as a reference-free metric and observe comparable performance to the state-of-the-art metrics on various dialogue evaluation datasets.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.10328v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.10328v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"bok-introducing-bag-of-keywords-loss-for","repo_url":"https://github.com/suvodipdey/bok","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"decoder","task_name":"Decoder"},{"task_slug":"dialogue-evaluation","task_name":"Dialogue Evaluation"},{"task_slug":"dialogue-generation","task_name":"Dialogue Generation"},{"task_slug":"language-modeling","task_name":"Language Modeling"},{"task_slug":"language-modelling","task_name":"Language Modelling"},{"task_slug":"response-generation","task_name":"Response Generation"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2501.10328","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}