Towards Socially Intelligent Agents with Mental State Transition and Human Utility
Building a socially intelligent agent involves many challenges, one of which is to track the agent's mental state transition and teach the agent to make rational decisions guided by its utility like a human. Towards this end, we propose to incorporate a mental state parser and utility model into dialogue agents. The hybrid mental state parser extracts information from both the dialogue and event observations and maintains a graphical representation of the agent's mind; Meanwhile, the utility model is a ranking model that learns human preferences from a crowd-sourced social commonsense dataset, Social IQA. Empirical results show that the proposed model attains state-of-the-art performance on the dialogue/action/emotion prediction task in the fantasy text-adventure game dataset, LIGHT. We also show example cases to demonstrate: (i) how the proposed mental state parser can assist agent's decision by grounding on the context like locations and objects, and (ii) how the utility model can help the agent make reasonable decisions in a dilemma. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first work that builds a socially intelligent agent by incorporating a hybrid mental state parser for both discrete events and continuous dialogues parsing and human-like utility modeling.
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