Large-scale pre-training has shown remarkable performance in building open-domain dialogue systems. However, previous works mainly focus on showing and evaluating the conversational performance of the released dialogue model, ignoring the discussion of some key factors towards a powerful human-like chatbot, especially in Chinese scenarios. In this paper, we conduct extensive experiments to investigate these under-explored factors, including data quality control, model architecture designs, training approaches, and decoding strategies. We propose EVA2.0, a large-scale pre-trained open-domain Chinese dialogue model with 2.8 billion parameters, and will make our models and codes publicly available. Automatic and human evaluations show that EVA2.0 significantly outperforms other open-source counterparts. We also discuss the limitations of this work by presenting some failure cases and pose some future research directions on large-scale Chinese open-domain dialogue systems.
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…
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…
Research Center for Social Computing and Information Retrieval, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China（中国哈尔滨工业大学社会计算与信息检索研究中心）；Joint Laboratory of HIT and iFLYTEK, iFLYTEK Research, Hefei, China（中国合肥科大讯飞研究院，哈工大讯飞联合实验室）
In this paper, we introduce the first evaluation of Chinese human-computer dialogue technology. We detail the evaluation scheme, tasks, metrics and how to collect and annotate the data for training, developing and test. The evaluation includes two tasks, namely user intent classification and online testing of task-oriented dialogue. To consider the different sources of the data for training and developing, the first task can also be divided into two sub tasks. Both the two tasks are coming from the real problems when using the applications developed by industry. The evaluation data is provided…
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…
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 …
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…
Due to the unfamiliarity to particular words(or proper nouns) for ingredients, non-native English speakers can be extremely confused about the ordering process in restaurants like Subway. Thus, We developed a dialogue system, which supports Chinese(Mandarin)1 and English2 at the same time. In other words, users can switch arbitrarily between Chinese(Mandarin) and English as the conversation is being conducted. This system is specifically designed for Subway ordering3. In BilDOS, we designed a Discriminator module to tell the language is being used in inputted user utterance, a Translator modul…
While the English virtual assistants have achieved exciting performance with an enormous amount of training resources, the needs of non-English-speakers have not been satisfied well. Up to Dec 2021, Alexa, one of the most popular smart speakers around the world, is able to support 9 different languages [1], while there are thousands of languages in the world, 91 of which are spoken by more than 10 million people according to statistics published in 2019 [2]. However, training a virtual assistant in other languages than English is often more difficult, especially for those low-resource language…
Most of the current task-oriented dialogue systems (ToD), despite having interesting results, are designed for a handful of languages like Chinese and English. Therefore, their performance in low-resource languages is still a significant problem due to the absence of a standard dataset and evaluation policy. To address this problem, we proposed ViWOZ, a fully-annotated Vietnamese task-oriented dialogue dataset. ViWOZ is the first multi-turn, multi-domain tasked oriented dataset in Vietnamese, a low-resource language. The dataset consists of a total of 5,000 dialogues, including 60,946 fully an…
The aim of this paper is to mitigate the shortcomings of automatic evaluation of open-domain dialog systems through multi-reference evaluation. Existing metrics have been shown to correlate poorly with human judgement, particularly in open-domain dialog. One alternative is to collect human annotations for evaluation, which can be expensive and time consuming. To demonstrate the effectiveness of multi-reference evaluation, we augment the test set of DailyDialog with multiple references. A series of experiments show that the use of multiple references results in improved correlation between seve…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Communication University of China（中国传媒大学）；Fudan University（复旦大学）
Compared with CrossWOZ (Chinese) and MultiWOZ (English) dataset which have coarse-grained information, there is no dataset which handle fine-grained and hierarchical level information properly. In this paper, we publish a first Cantonese knowledge-driven Dialogue Dataset for REStaurant (KddRES) in Hong Kong, which grounds the information in multi-turn conversations to one specific restaurant. Our corpus contains 0.8k conversations which derive from 10 restaurants with various styles in different regions. In addition to that, we designed fine-grained slots and intents to better capture semantic…
Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California（南加州大学信息科学研究所）；Computer Science Department, University of California, Los Angeles（加州大学洛杉矶分校计算机科学系）
Ad hominem attacks are those that target some feature of a person's character instead of the position the person is maintaining. These attacks are harmful because they propagate implicit biases and diminish a person's credibility. Since dialogue systems respond directly to user input, it is important to study ad hominems in dialogue responses. To this end, we propose categories of ad hominems, compose an annotated dataset, and build a classifier to analyze human and dialogue system responses to English Twitter posts. We specifically compare responses to Twitter topics about marginalized commun…
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）
The goal of building intelligent dialogue systems has largely been separately pursued under two motives: task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems, and open-domain systems for chit-chat (CC). Although previous TOD dialogue systems work well in the testing sets of benchmarks, they would lead to undesirable failure when being exposed to natural scenarios in practice, where user utterances can be of high motive-diversity that fusing both TOD and CC in multi-turn interaction. Since an industrial TOD system should be able to converse with the user between TOD and CC motives, constructing a fuse-motive d…
CharacterEval: A Chinese Benchmark for Role-Playing Conversational Agent Evaluation
Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence, Renmin University of China（中国人民大学高瓴人工智能学院）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学人工智能学院）
University of Lincoln（林肯大学）；Samsung Research（三星研究院）
The amount of dialogue history to include in a conversational agent is often underestimated and/or set in an empirical and thus possibly naive way. This suggests that principled investigations into optimal context windows are urgently needed given that the amount of dialogue history and corresponding representations can play an important role in the overall performance of a conversational system. This paper studies the amount of history required by conversational agents for reliably predicting dialogue rewards. The task of dialogue reward prediction is chosen for investigating the effects of v…
Pattern Recognition Center, WeChat AI, Tencent Inc（腾讯公司微信人工智能模式识别中心）
Loading models pre-trained on the large-scale corpus in the general domain and fine-tuning them on specific downstream tasks is gradually becoming a paradigm in Natural Language Processing. Previous investigations prove that introducing a further pre-training phase between pre-training and fine-tuning phases to adapt the model on the domain-specific unlabeled data can bring positive effects. However, most of these further pre-training works just keep running the conventional pre-training task, e.g., masked language model, which can be regarded as the domain adaptation to bridge the data distri…
Medical dialogue systems are promising in assisting in telemedicine to increase access to healthcare services, improve the quality of patient care, and reduce medical costs. To facilitate the research and development of medical dialogue systems, we build two large-scale medical dialogue datasets: MedDialog-EN and MedDialog-CN. MedDialog-EN is an English dataset containing 0.3 million conversations between patients and doctors and 0.5 million utterances. MedDialog-CN is an Chinese dataset containing 1.1 million conversations and 4 million utterances. To our best knowledge, MedDialog-(EN,CN) are…
Knowledge of users' emotion states helps improve human-computer interaction. In this work, we presented EmoNet, an emotion detector of Chinese daily dialogues based on deep convolutional neural networks. In order to maintain the original linguistic features, such as the order, commonly used methods like segmentation and keywords extraction were not adopted, instead we increased the depth of CNN and tried to let CNN learn inner linguistic relationships. Our main contribution is that we presented a new model and a new pipeline which can be used in multi-language environment to solve sentimental …
Hunan University（湖南大学）；JD Technology（京东科技）；Xiangya Hospital of Central South University（中南大学湘雅医院）
Medical Dialogue Generation (MDG) is intended to build a medical dialogue system for intelligent consultation, which can communicate with patients in real-time, thereby improving the efficiency of clinical diagnosis with broad application prospects. This paper presents our proposed framework for the Chinese MDG organized by the 2021 China conference on knowledge graph and semantic computing (CCKS) competition, which requires generating context-consistent and medically meaningful responses conditioned on the dialogue history. In our framework, we propose a pipeline system composed of entity pre…
National Taiwan University（国立台湾大学）；MediaTek Research（联发科研究院）
Dialogue systems are usually categorized into two types, open-domain and task-oriented. The first one focuses on chatting with users and making them engage in the conversations, where selecting a proper topic to fit the dialogue context is essential for a successful dialogue. The other one focuses on a specific task instead of casual talks, e.g., finding a movie on Friday night, or playing a song. These two directions have been studied separately due to their different purposes. However, how smoothly transitioning from social chatting to task-oriented dialogues is important for triggering busi…
Recently, the practical deployment of open-domain dialogue systems has been plagued by the knowledge issue of information deficiency and factual inaccuracy. To this end, we introduce PLATO-K based on two-stage dialogic learning to strengthen internal knowledge memorization and external knowledge exploitation. In the first stage, PLATO-K learns through massive dialogue corpora and memorizes essential knowledge into model parameters. In the second stage, PLATO-K mimics human beings to search for external information and to leverage the knowledge in response generation. Extensive experiments reve…
In order to alleviate the shortage of multi-domain data and to capture discourse phenomena for task-oriented dialogue modeling, we propose RiSAWOZ, a large-scale multi-domain Chinese Wizard-of-Oz dataset with Rich Semantic Annotations. RiSAWOZ contains 11.2K human-to-human (H2H) multi-turn semantically annotated dialogues, with more than 150K utterances spanning over 12 domains, which is larger than all previous annotated H2H conversational datasets. Both single- and multi-domain dialogues are constructed, accounting for 65% and 35%, respectively. Each dialogue is labeled with comprehensive di…
East China University of Science and Technology（华东理工大学）；Tongji University（同济大学）
The medical dialogue system is a promising application that can provide great convenience for patients. The dialogue state tracking (DST) module in the medical dialogue system which interprets utterances into the machine-readable structure for downstream tasks is particularly challenging. Firstly, the states need to be able to represent compound entities such as symptoms with their body part or diseases with degrees of severity to provide enough information for decision support. Secondly, these named entities in the utterance might be discontinuous and scattered across sentences and speakers. …
Singapore University of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学）
Task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems have assisted users on many tasks, including ticket booking and service inquiries. While existing TOD systems have shown promising performance in serving customer needs, these systems mostly assume that users would interact with the dialogue agent politely. This assumption is unrealistic as impatient or frustrated customers may also interact with TOD systems impolitely. This paper aims to address this research gap by investigating impolite users' effects on TOD systems. Specifically, we constructed an impolite dialogue corpus and conducted extensive experim…
DialectS2S: End-to-End Speech Dialogue Modeling for Low-Resource Chinese Dialects
School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；Wuhan AI Research（武汉人工智能研究院）；GWM AI Lab（长城汽车人工智能实验室）
Large-scale open-domain dialogue systems such as PLATO-2 have achieved state-of-the-art scores in both English and Chinese. However, little work explores whether such dialogue systems also work well in the Japanese language. In this work, we create a large-scale Japanese dialogue dataset, Dialogue-Graph, which contains 1.656 million dialogue data in a tree structure from News, TV subtitles, and Wikipedia corpus. Then, we train PLATO-2 using Dialogue-Graph to build a large-scale Japanese dialogue system, PLATO-JDS. In addition, to improve the PLATO-JDS in the topic switch issue, we introduce a …
Crosstalk, also known by its Chinese name xiangsheng, is a traditional Chinese comedic performing art featuring jokes and funny dialogues, and one of China's most popular cultural elements. It is typically in the form of a dialogue between two performers for the purpose of bringing laughter to the audience, with one person acting as the leading comedian and the other as the supporting role. Though general dialogue generation has been widely explored in previous studies, it is unknown whether such entertaining dialogues can be automatically generated or not. In this paper, we for the first time…
UC San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；CMU（卡内基梅隆大学）；UC Davis（加州大学戴维斯分校）
Under the pandemic of COVID-19, people experiencing COVID19-related symptoms or exposed to risk factors have a pressing need to consult doctors. Due to hospital closure, a lot of consulting services have been moved online. Because of the shortage of medical professionals, many people cannot receive online consultations timely. To address this problem, we aim to develop a medical dialogue system that can provide COVID19-related consultations. We collected two dialogue datasets -- CovidDialog -- (in English and Chinese respectively) containing conversations between doctors and patients about COV…
Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology, Peking University（北京大学王选计算机研究所）；The MOE Key Laboratory of Computational Linguistics, Peking University（北京大学计算语言学教育部重点实验室）；Ecole Polytechnique（巴黎综合理工学院）
Crosstalk is a traditional Chinese theatrical performance art. It is commonly performed by two performers in the form of a dialogue. With the typical features of dialogues, crosstalks are also designed to be hilarious for the purpose of amusing the audience. In this study, we introduce CrossDial, the first open-source dataset containing most classic Chinese crosstalks crawled from the Web. Moreover, we define two new tasks, provide two benchmarks, and investigate the ability of current dialogue generation models in the field of crosstalk generation. The experiment results and case studies demo…
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…
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 …
National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, Institute of Automation, CAS（中国科学院自动化研究所模式识别国家重点实验室）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；Fanyu AI Laboratory, Zhongke Fanyu Technology Co., Ltd（中科凡语科技有限公司凡语AI实验室）
Dialogue summarization has drawn much attention recently. Especially in the customer service domain, agents could use dialogue summaries to help boost their works by quickly knowing customer's issues and service progress. These applications require summaries to contain the perspective of a single speaker and have a clear topic flow structure, while neither are available in existing datasets. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce a novel Chinese dataset for Customer Service Dialogue Summarization (CSDS). CSDS improves the abstractive summaries in two aspects: (1) In addition to the overall sum…
With the development of the Internet, more and more people get accustomed to online shopping. When communicating with customer service, users may express their requirements by means of text, images, and videos, which precipitates the need for understanding these multimodal information for automatic customer service systems. Images usually act as discriminators for product models, or indicators of product failures, which play important roles in the E-commerce scenario. On the other hand, detailed information provided by the images is limited, and typically, customer service systems cannot under…
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…
Predicting the Big Five Personality Traits in Chinese Counselling Dialogues Using Large Language Models
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；School of Engineering, Westlake University（西湖大学工程学院）；Westlake University（西湖大学）；School of Early Childhood Education, Hangzhou Polytechnic（杭州职业技术学院幼儿教育学院）
CPsyCoun: A Report-based Multi-turn Dialogue Reconstruction and Evaluation Framework for Chinese Psychological Counseling
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）；University of Macau（澳门大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Jilin University（吉林大学）；South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；Shenzhen MSU-BIT University（深圳北理莫斯科大学）
Indiana University Bloomington（印第安纳大学伯明顿分校）；Brigham Young University（杨百翰大学）；Northwestern University（西北大学）；UNC Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校）；Allen Institute for AI（艾伦人工智能研究所）；Shanghai Jiaotong Univ.（上海交通大学）
Multilingual transformers (XLM, mT5) have been shown to have remarkable transfer skills in zero-shot settings. Most transfer studies, however, rely on automatically translated resources (XNLI, XQuAD), making it hard to discern the particular linguistic knowledge that is being transferred, and the role of expert annotated monolingual datasets when developing task-specific models. We investigate the cross-lingual transfer abilities of XLM-R for Chinese and English natural language inference (NLI), with a focus on the recent large-scale Chinese dataset OCNLI. To better understand linguistic trans…
A benchmark for joint dialogue satisfaction, emotion recognition, and emotion state transition prediction
School of Computer Science and Technology, Xinjiang University（新疆大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Institute of Artificial Intelligence (TeleAI), China Telecom Corp Ltd（人工智能研究所（TeleAI））；Joint International Research Laboratory of Silk Road Multilingual Cognitive Computing（丝绸之路多语种认知计算联合国际实验室）；Xinjiang Key Laboratory of Multi-lingual Information Technology（新疆多语种信息处理重点实验室）
