Paper ID: 2205.09327

Let's Talk! Striking Up Conversations via Conversational Visual Question Generation

Shih-Han Chan, Tsai-Lun Yang, Yun-Wei Chu, Chi-Yang Hsu, Ting-Hao Huang, Yu-Shian Chiu, Lun-Wei Ku

An engaging and provocative question can open up a great conversation. In this work, we explore a novel scenario: a conversation agent views a set of the user's photos (for example, from social media platforms) and asks an engaging question to initiate a conversation with the user. The existing vision-to-question models mostly generate tedious and obvious questions, which might not be ideals conversation starters. This paper introduces a two-phase framework that first generates a visual story for the photo set and then uses the story to produce an interesting question. The human evaluation shows that our framework generates more response-provoking questions for starting conversations than other vision-to-question baselines.

Submitted: May 19, 2022