Flexibly Utilize Memory for Long-Term Conversation via a Fragment-then-Compose Framework

Large language models (LLMs) have made significant breakthroughs in extracting useful information from conversation history to enhance the response in long-term conversations. Summarizing useful information from historical conversations has achieved remarkable performance, which, however, may introduce irrelevant or redundant information, making it difficult to flexibly choose and integrate key information from different sessions during memory retrieval. To address this issue, we propose a Fragment-then-Compose framework, a novel memory utilization approach for long-term open-domain conversation, called FraCom. To be specific, inspired by the concept of proposition representation from Cognitive Psychology, we first represent the conversation history as a series of predicates plus arguments for propositional representation to preserve key information useful for memory ("Fragment"). Then, we compose propositional graphs for the conversation history based on the connection between shared arguments ("Compose"). During retrieval, we retrieve relevant propositions from the graph based on arguments from the current query. This essentially allows for flexible and effective utilization of related information in long-term memory for better response generation towards a query. Experimental results on four long-term open-domain conversation datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our FraCom in memory utilization and its ability to enhance response generation for LLMs.