# Stylistic Retrieval-based Dialogue System with Unparallel Training Data

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.05477 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05477/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Sep 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Enriching Word Vectors with Subword Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.04606/) (2016)
- [A Diversity-Promoting Objective Function for Neural Conversation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.03055/) (2015)
- [Personalizing Dialogue Agents: I have a dog, do you have pets too?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07243/) (2018)
- [Toward Controlled Generation of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00955/) (2017)
- [Style Transfer from Non-Parallel Text by Cross-Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.09655/) (2017)
- [A Persona-Based Neural Conversation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06155/) (2016)
- [Delete, Retrieve, Generate: A Simple Approach to Sentiment and Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06437/) (2018)
- [Reformulating Unsupervised Style Transfer as Paraphrase Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05700/) (2020)
- [Emotional Chatting Machine: Emotional Conversation Generation with Internal and External Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01074/) (2017)
- [Style Transfer in Text: Exploration and Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06861/) (2017)
- [Disentangled Representation Learning for Non-Parallel Text Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.04339/) (2018)
- [Neural Responding Machine for Short-Text Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02364/) (2015)
- [Sequential Matching Network: A New Architecture for Multi-turn Response Selection in Retrieval-based Chatbots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01627/) (2016)
- [From Eliza to XiaoIce: Challenges and Opportunities with Social Chatbots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01957/) (2018)
- [Personalizing Dialogue Agents via Meta-Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10033/) (2019)
- [Transforming Delete, Retrieve, Generate Approach for Controlled Text Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09368/) (2019)
- [BoB: BERT Over BERT for Training Persona-based Dialogue Models from Limited Personalized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06169/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Text Style Transfer using Language Models as Discriminators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.11749/) (2018)
- [Modeling Multi-turn Conversation with Deep Utterance Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.09102/) (2018)
- [Polite Dialogue Generation Without Parallel Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.03162/) (2018)
- [Unpaired Sentiment-to-Sentiment Translation: A Cycled Reinforcement Learning Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.05181/) (2018)
- ["Mask and Infill" : Applying Masked Language Model to Sentiment Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08039/) (2019)
- [Generate, Delete and Rewrite: A Three-Stage Framework for Improving Persona Consistency of Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07672/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Text Generation by Learning from Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08557/) (2020)
- [On Learning Text Style Transfer with Direct Rewards](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12771/) (2020)
- [Prototype-to-Style: Dialogue Generation with Style-Aware Editing on Retrieval Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02214/) (2020)
- [A Hierarchical Reinforced Sequence Operation Method for Unsupervised Text Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01833/) (2019)
- [Neural Personalized Response Generation as Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.02073/) (2017)
- [Learning Personalized End-to-End Goal-Oriented Dialog](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.04604/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [The Adaptation Paradox: Agency vs. Mimicry in Companion Chatbots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12525/) (2025)
- [Structured Style-Rewrite with Chain-of-Thought Planning for Low-Resource Character Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.05933/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The ability of a dialog system to express consistent language style during conversations has a direct, positive impact on its usability and on user satisfaction. Although previous studies have demonstrated that style transfer is feasible with a large amount of parallel data, it is often impossible to collect such data for different styles. In this paper, instead of manually constructing conversation data with a certain style, we propose a flexible framework that adapts a generic retrieval-based dialogue system to mimic the language style of a specified persona without any parallel data. Our approach is based on automatic generation of stylized data by learning the usage of jargon, and then rewriting the generic conversations to a stylized one by incorporating the jargon. In experiments we implemented dialogue systems with five distinct language styles, and the result shows our framework significantly outperforms baselines in terms of the average score of responses' relevance and style degree, and content diversity. A/B testing on a commercial chatbot shows that users are more satisfied with our system. This study demonstrates the feasibility of building stylistic dialogue systems by simple data augmentation.