In this paper, we propose a Chinese multi-turn topic-driven conversation dataset, NaturalConv, which allows the participants to chat anything they want as long as any element from the topic is mentioned and the topic shift is smooth. Our corpus contains 19.9K conversations from six domains, and 400K utterances with an average turn number of 20.1. These conversations contain in-depth discussions on related topics or widely natural transition between multiple topics. We believe either way is normal for human conversation. To facilitate the research on this corpus, we provide results of several benchmark models. Comparative results show that for this dataset, our current models are not able to provide significant improvement by introducing background knowledge/topic. Therefore, the proposed dataset should be a good benchmark for further research to evaluate the validity and naturalness of multi-turn conversation systems. Our dataset is available at https://ailab.tencent.com/ailab/nlp/dialogue/#datasets.
Existing commonsense knowledge bases often organize tuples in an isolated manner, which is deficient for commonsense conversational models to plan the next steps. To fill the gap, we curate a large-scale multi-turn human-written conversation corpus, and create the first Chinese commonsense conversation knowledge graph which incorporates both social commonsense knowledge and dialog flow information. To show the potential of our graph, we develop a graph-conversation matching approach, and benchmark two graph-grounded conversational tasks.
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
Code-switching is a speech phenomenon occurring when a speaker switches language during a conversation. Despite the spontaneous nature of code-switching in conversational spoken language, most existing works collect code-switching data from read speech instead of spontaneous speech. ASCEND (A Spontaneous Chinese-English Dataset) is a high-quality Mandarin Chinese-English code-switching corpus built on spontaneous multi-turn conversational dialogue sources collected in Hong Kong. We report ASCEND's design and procedure for collecting the speech data, including annotations. ASCEND consists of 10…
The University of Melbourne（墨尔本大学）；Tencent（腾讯）；Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab（华为诺亚方舟实验室）
Conversations are always related to certain topics. However, it is challenging to fuse dialogue history and topic information from various sources at the same time in current dialogue generation models because of the input length limit of pre-trained language models (PLMs). In order to expand the information that PLMs can utilize, we encode topic and dialogue history information using certain prompts with multiple channels of Fusion-in-Decoder (FiD) and explore the influence of three different channel settings. In this paper, our experiments focus on a specific Chinese dataset named NaturalCon…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School（清华大学深圳国际研究生院）；Samsung Research China - Beijing (SRC-B)（三星中国研究院-北京）
The advancements of neural dialogue generation models show promising results on modeling short-text conversations. However, training such models usually needs a large-scale high-quality dialogue corpus, which is hard to access. In this paper, we present a large-scale cleaned Chinese conversation dataset, LCCC, which contains a base version (6.8million dialogues) and a large version (12.0 million dialogues). The quality of our dataset is ensured by a rigorous data cleaning pipeline, which is built based on a set of rules and a classifier that is trained on manually annotated 110K dialogue pairs…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology（北京信息科学与技术国家研究中心）
The research of knowledge-driven conversational systems is largely limited due to the lack of dialog data which consist of multi-turn conversations on multiple topics and with knowledge annotations. In this paper, we propose a Chinese multi-domain knowledge-driven conversation dataset, KdConv, which grounds the topics in multi-turn conversations to knowledge graphs. Our corpus contains 4.5K conversations from three domains (film, music, and travel), and 86K utterances with an average turn number of 19.0. These conversations contain in-depth discussions on related topics and natural transition …
Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；Baidu Inc.（百度公司）
In this paper, we provide a bilingual parallel human-to-human recommendation dialog dataset (DuRecDial 2.0) to enable researchers to explore a challenging task of multilingual and cross-lingual conversational recommendation. The difference between DuRecDial 2.0 and existing conversational recommendation datasets is that the data item (Profile, Goal, Knowledge, Context, Response) in DuRecDial 2.0 is annotated in two languages, both English and Chinese, while other datasets are built with the setting of a single language. We collect 8.2k dialogs aligned across English and Chinese languages (16.5…
South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；UBTECH Robotics Corp（优必选科技股份有限公司）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
Human language expression is based on the subjective construal of the situation instead of the objective truth conditions, which means that speakers' personalities and emotions after cognitive processing have an important influence on conversation. However, most existing datasets for conversational AI ignore human personalities and emotions, or only consider part of them. It's difficult for dialogue systems to understand speakers' personalities and emotions although large-scale pre-training language models have been widely used. In order to consider both personalities and emotions in the proce…
Human conversations are complicated and building a human-like dialogue agent is an extremely challenging task. With the rapid development of deep learning techniques, data-driven models become more and more prevalent which need a huge amount of real conversation data. In this paper, we construct a large-scale real scenario Chinese E-commerce conversation corpus, JDDC, with more than 1 million multi-turn dialogues, 20 million utterances, and 150 million words. The dataset reflects several characteristics of human-human conversations, e.g., goal-driven, and long-term dependency among the context…
We present a corpus that encompasses the complete history of conversations between contributors to Wikipedia, one of the largest online collaborative communities. By recording the intermediate states of conversations---including not only comments and replies, but also their modifications, deletions and restorations---this data offers an unprecedented view of online conversation. This level of detail supports new research questions pertaining to the process (and challenges) of large-scale online collaboration. We illustrate the corpus' potential with two case studies that highlight new perspect…
Practical dialog systems need to deal with various knowledge sources, noisy user expressions, and the shortage of annotated data. To better solve the above problems, we propose CGoDial, new challenging and comprehensive Chinese benchmark for multi-domain Goal-oriented Dialog evaluation. It contains 96,763 dialog sessions and 574,949 dialog turns totally, covering three datasets with different knowledge sources: 1) a slot-based dialog (SBD) dataset with table-formed knowledge, 2) a flow-based dialog (FBD) dataset with tree-formed knowledge, and a retrieval-based dialog (RBD) dataset with candid…
Multimodal machine translation and textual chat translation have received considerable attention in recent years. Although the conversation in its natural form is usually multimodal, there still lacks work on multimodal machine translation in conversations. In this work, we introduce a new task named Multimodal Chat Translation (MCT), aiming to generate more accurate translations with the help of the associated dialogue history and visual context. To this end, we firstly construct a Multimodal Sentiment Chat Translation Dataset (MSCTD) containing 142,871 English-Chinese utterance pairs in 14,7…
University of Mannheim（曼海姆大学）；Bocconi University（博科尼大学）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；University of Würzburg（维尔茨堡大学）
Research on (multi-domain) task-oriented dialog (TOD) has predominantly focused on the English language, primarily due to the shortage of robust TOD datasets in other languages, preventing the systematic investigation of cross-lingual transfer for this crucial NLP application area. In this work, we introduce Multi2WOZ, a new multilingual multi-domain TOD dataset, derived from the well-established English dataset MultiWOZ, that spans four typologically diverse languages: Chinese, German, Arabic, and Russian. In contrast to concurrent efforts, Multi2WOZ contains gold-standard dialogs in target l…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）
Despite the effectiveness of sequence-to-sequence framework on the task of Short-Text Conversation (STC), the issue of under-exploitation of training data (i.e., the supervision signals from query text is \textit{ignored}) still remains unresolved. Also, the adopted \textit{maximization}-based decoding strategies, inclined to generating the generic responses or responses with repetition, are unsuited to the STC task. In this paper, we propose to formulate the STC task as a language modeling problem and tailor-make a training strategy to adapt a language model for response generation. To enhanc…
This paper introduces Doc2Bot, a novel dataset for building machines that help users seek information via conversations. This is of particular interest for companies and organizations that own a large number of manuals or instruction books. Despite its potential, the nature of our task poses several challenges: (1) documents contain various structures that hinder the ability of machines to comprehend, and (2) user information needs are often underspecified. Compared to prior datasets that either focus on a single structural type or overlook the role of questioning to uncover user needs, the Do…
Many open-domain dialogue models pre-trained with social media comments can generate coherent replies but have difficulties producing engaging responses when interacting with real users. This phenomenon might mainly result from the deficiency of annotated human-human conversations and the misalignment with human preference. In this paper, we propose a novel and efficient approach Diamante to boost the open-domain chatbot, where two kinds of human feedback (including explicit demonstration and implicit preference) are collected and leveraged. By asking annotators to select or amend the model-ge…
Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）；Westlake University（西湖大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）
Non-task oriented dialogue systems have achieved great success in recent years due to largely accessible conversation data and the development of deep learning techniques. Given a context, current systems are able to yield a relevant and fluent response, but sometimes make logical mistakes because of weak reasoning capabilities. To facilitate the conversation reasoning research, we introduce MuTual, a novel dataset for Multi-Turn dialogue Reasoning, consisting of 8,860 manually annotated dialogues based on Chinese student English listening comprehension exams. Compared to previous benchmarks f…
Figures of speech, such as metaphor and irony, are ubiquitous in literature works and colloquial conversations. This poses great challenge for natural language understanding since figures of speech usually deviate from their ostensible meanings to express deeper semantic implications. Previous research lays emphasis on the literary aspect of figures and seldom provide a comprehensive exploration from a view of computational linguistics. In this paper, we first propose the concept of figurative unit, which is the carrier of a figure. Then we select 12 types of figures commonly used in Chinese, …
Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；Baidu Inc.（百度公司）
We propose a new task of conversational recommendation over multi-type dialogs, where the bots can proactively and naturally lead a conversation from a non-recommendation dialog (e.g., QA) to a recommendation dialog, taking into account user's interests and feedback. To facilitate the study of this task, we create a human-to-human Chinese dialog dataset \emph{DuRecDial} (about 10k dialogs, 156k utterances), which contains multiple sequential dialogs for every pair of a recommendation seeker (user) and a recommender (bot). In each dialog, the recommender proactively leads a multi-type dialog to…
Speech disorders often occur at the early stage of Parkinson's disease (PD). The speech impairments could be indicators of the disorder for early diagnosis, while motor symptoms are not obvious. In this study, we constructed a new speech corpus of Mandarin Chinese and addressed classification of patients with PD. We implemented classical machine learning methods with ranking algorithms for feature selection, convolutional and recurrent deep networks, and an end to end system. Our classification accuracy significantly surpassed state-of-the-art studies. The result suggests that free talk has st…
Dialogue contradiction is a critical issue in open-domain dialogue systems. The contextualization nature of conversations makes dialogue contradiction detection rather challenging. In this work, we propose a benchmark for Contradiction Detection in Chinese Conversations, namely CDConv. It contains 12K multi-turn conversations annotated with three typical contradiction categories: Intra-sentence Contradiction, Role Confusion, and History Contradiction. To efficiently construct the CDConv conversations, we devise a series of methods for automatic conversation generation, which simulate common us…
Institute of Acoustics, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院声学研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Magic Data Technology Co., Ltd.（魔数智音科技有限公司）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）
This paper introduces a high-quality rich annotated Mandarin conversational (RAMC) speech dataset called MagicData-RAMC. The MagicData-RAMC corpus contains 180 hours of conversational speech data recorded from native speakers of Mandarin Chinese over mobile phones with a sampling rate of 16 kHz. The dialogs in MagicData-RAMC are classified into 15 diversified domains and tagged with topic labels, ranging from science and technology to ordinary life. Accurate transcription and precise speaker voice activity timestamps are manually labeled for each sample. Speakers' detailed information is also …
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Brandeis University（布兰迪斯大学）
Pronouns are often dropped in Chinese sentences, and this happens more frequently in conversational genres as their referents can be easily understood from context. Recovering dropped pronouns is essential to applications such as Information Extraction where the referents of these dropped pronouns need to be resolved, or Machine Translation when Chinese is the source language. In this work, we present a novel end-to-end neural network model to recover dropped pronouns in conversational data. Our model is based on a structured attention mechanism that models the referents of dropped pronouns ut…
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Pattern Recognition Center, WeChat AI, Tencent Inc（腾讯公司微信AI模式识别中心）
As a kind of new expression elements, Internet memes are popular and extensively used in online chatting scenarios since they manage to make dialogues vivid, moving, and interesting. However, most current dialogue researches focus on text-only dialogue tasks. In this paper, we propose a new task named as \textbf{M}eme incorporated \textbf{O}pen-domain \textbf{D}ialogue (MOD). Compared to previous dialogue tasks, MOD is much more challenging since it requires the model to understand the multimodal elements as well as the emotions behind them. To facilitate the MOD research, we construct a large…
Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；Utrecht University（乌得勒支大学）；Samsung Research China - Beijing (SRC-B)（三星中国研究院-北京（SRC-B））
Incorporating multi-modal contexts in conversation is important for developing more engaging dialogue systems. In this work, we explore this direction by introducing MMChat: a large-scale Chinese multi-modal dialogue corpus (32.4M raw dialogues and 120.84K filtered dialogues). Unlike previous corpora that are crowd-sourced or collected from fictitious movies, MMChat contains image-grounded dialogues collected from real conversations on social media, in which the sparsity issue is observed. Specifically, image-initiated dialogues in common communications may deviate to some non-image-grounded t…
Meituan Group（美团集团）；National Engineering Research Center for Software Engineering, Peking University（北京大学软件工程国家工程研究中心）
Event detection (ED) identifies and classifies event triggers from unstructured texts, serving as a fundamental task for information extraction. Despite the remarkable progress achieved in the past several years, most research efforts focus on detecting events from formal texts (e.g., news articles, Wikipedia documents, financial announcements). Moreover, the texts in each dataset are either from a single source or multiple yet relatively homogeneous sources. With massive amounts of user-generated text accumulating on the Web and inside enterprises, identifying meaningful events in these infor…
The aim of this work is to define a speech emotion recognition (SER) model able to recognize positive, neutral and negative emotions in natural conversations of Italian elderly people. Several datasets for SER are available in the literature. However most of them are in English or Chinese, have been recorded while actors and actresses pronounce short phrases and thus are not related to natural conversation. Moreover only few speeches among all the databases are related to elderly people. Therefore, in this work, a multi-language and multi-age corpus is considered merging a dataset in English, …
Fine-grained Verbal Attack Detection via a Hierarchical Divide-and-Conquer Framework
Beijing Normal University（北京师范大学）；Zhongguancun Academy（中关村学院）；Zhongguancun Institute of Artificial Intelligence（中关村人工智能研究院）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Fudan University（复旦大学）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）
Numerous online conversations are produced on a daily basis, resulting in a pressing need to conversation understanding. As a basis to structure a discussion, we identify the responding relations in the conversation discourse, which link response utterances to their initiations. To figure out who responded to whom, here we explore how the consistency of topic contents and dependency of discourse roles indicate such interactions, whereas most prior work ignore the effects of latent factors underlying word occurrences. We propose a model to learn latent topics and discourse in word distributions…
To explore the limit of dialogue generation pre-training, we present the models of PLATO-XL with up to 11 billion parameters, trained on both Chinese and English social media conversations. To train such large models, we adopt the architecture of unified transformer with high computation and parameter efficiency. In addition, we carry out multi-party aware pre-training to better distinguish the characteristic information in social media conversations. With such designs, PLATO-XL successfully achieves superior performances as compared to other approaches in both Chinese and English chitchat. We…
Orca: A Few-shot Benchmark for Chinese Conversational Machine Reading Comprehension
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；IDEA（深圳国际数字经济研究院）；Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）
CAPE: A Chinese Dataset for Appraisal-based Emotional Generation using Large Language Models
International Digital Economy Academy (IDEA)（国际数字经济学院（IDEA））；University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；University of California, Los Angeles（加州大学洛杉矶分校）
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Shanghai Mental Health Center（上海市精神卫生中心）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine（上海交通大学医学院）
In a depression-diagnosis-directed clinical session, doctors initiate a conversation with ample emotional support that guides the patients to expose their symptoms based on clinical diagnosis criteria. Such a dialogue system is distinguished from existing single-purpose human-machine dialog systems, as it combines task-oriented and chit-chats with uniqueness in dialogue topics and procedures. However, due to the social stigma associated with mental illness, the dialogue data related to depression consultation and diagnosis are rarely disclosed. Based on clinical depression diagnostic criteria …
This paper presents a large-scale corpus for non-task-oriented dialogue response selection, which contains over 27K distinct prompts more than 82K responses collected from social media. To annotate this corpus, we define a 5-grade rating scheme: bad, mediocre, acceptable, good, and excellent, according to the relevance, coherence, informativeness, interestingness, and the potential to move a conversation forward. To test the validity and usefulness of the produced corpus, we compare various unsupervised and supervised models for response selection. Experimental results confirm that the propose…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Institute for Artificial Intelligence（人工智能研究院）；Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology（北京信息科学与技术国家研究中心）
To advance multi-domain (cross-domain) dialogue modeling as well as alleviate the shortage of Chinese task-oriented datasets, we propose CrossWOZ, the first large-scale Chinese Cross-Domain Wizard-of-Oz task-oriented dataset. It contains 6K dialogue sessions and 102K utterances for 5 domains, including hotel, restaurant, attraction, metro, and taxi. Moreover, the corpus contains rich annotation of dialogue states and dialogue acts at both user and system sides. About 60% of the dialogues have cross-domain user goals that favor inter-domain dependency and encourage natural transition across dom…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯AI实验室）
Quotations are crucial for successful explanations and persuasions in interpersonal communications. However, finding what to quote in a conversation is challenging for both humans and machines. This work studies automatic quotation generation in an online conversation and explores how language consistency affects whether a quotation fits the given context. Here, we capture the contextual consistency of a quotation in terms of latent topics, interactions with the dialogue history, and coherence to the query turn's existing content. Further, an encoder-decoder neural framework is employed to con…
Multilingual Dyadic Interaction Corpus NoXi+J: Toward Understanding Asian-European Non-verbal Cultural Characteristics and their Influences on Engagement
University of Augsburg（奥格斯堡大学）；Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology（日本先进科学技术学院）
Fostering Natural Conversation in Large Language Models with NICO: a Natural Interactive COnversation dataset
International Digital Economy Academy（国际数字经济学院）；University of California, Los Angeles（加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校）；University of Michigan, Ann Arbor（密歇根大学安娜堡分校）；Simon Fraser University（西蒙菲莎大学）
Sun Yat-Sen University（中山大学）；Dark Matter AI Inc.（暗物质人工智能公司）
Target-guided open-domain conversation aims to proactively and naturally guide a dialogue agent or human to achieve specific goals, topics or keywords during open-ended conversations. Existing methods mainly rely on single-turn datadriven learning and simple target-guided strategy without considering semantic or factual knowledge relations among candidate topics/keywords. This results in poor transition smoothness and low success rate. In this work, we adopt a structured approach that controls the intended content of system responses by introducing coarse-grained keywords, attains smooth conve…
Although pre-trained language models have remarkably enhanced the generation ability of dialogue systems, open-domain Chinese dialogue systems are still limited by the dialogue data and the model size compared with English ones. In this paper, we propose EVA, a Chinese dialogue system that contains the largest Chinese pre-trained dialogue model with 2.8B parameters. To build this model, we collect the largest Chinese dialogue dataset named WDC-Dialogue from various public social media. This dataset contains 1.4B context-response pairs and is used as the pre-training corpus of EVA. Extensive ex…
MDD-5k: A New Diagnostic Conversation Dataset for Mental Disorders Synthesized via Neuro-Symbolic LLM Agents
Theta Health Inc.（西塔健康公司）；Chen Frontier Lab for AI and Mental Health, Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute（天桥脑科学研究院陈天桥雒芊芊脑科学研究院AI与精神健康前沿实验室）；Shanghai Mental Health Center（上海市精神卫生中心）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine（上海交通大学医学院）；Shanghai Clinical Research Center for Mental Health（上海市精神疾病临床医学中心）；Shanghai Key Laboratory of Psychotic Disorders（上海市精神疾病重点实验室）
NewsDialogues: Towards Proactive News Grounded Conversation
Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University（清华大学深圳国际研究生院）；Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab（华为诺亚方舟实验室）；Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；Peking University（北京大学）
