Towards Insightful Automated Dialog for Therapy through Top-down/Bottom-up Response Generation

Dialog-based procedures are important in the ther-apy, growth, and development of individuals. Response generation is a main component of any dialog system and producing insightful responses as part of a dialog remains challenging. This paper presents a response generation method that combines a fast and reactive top-down response generation flow with a slow and planned (e.g., reasoned) bottom-up flow. The two flows attempt to balance the speed and quality of response generation. Experiments present different types of generated responses.