在第二语言学习中，基于场景的对话练习对于语言学习者实现口语流利至关重要，但学生往往缺乏足够的机会与合格的教师或母语者练习对话技能。为弥合这一差距，我们提出了情境对话模型，供学生进行对话练习。我们的情境对话模型在大语言模型（LLMs）上进行微调，旨在将开放式对话的参与性与基于场景任务的针对性练习相结合。利用大语言模型的泛化能力，我们证明我们的情境对话模型不仅在训练主题上表现有效，而且在训练期间未遇到的主题上同样有效。这为支持广泛的对话主题提供了一种有前景的解决方案，而无需大量人工工作。此外，对话系统领域的研究仍缺乏可靠的自动评估指标，导致人工评估成为黄金标准（Smith et al., 2022），而这通常成本高昂。为解决现有评估方法的局限性，我们提出了一种新颖的自动评估方法，该方法采用微调后的大语言模型来高效且有效地评估情境对话模型的性能。
英文摘要：
In second language learning, scenario-based conversation practice is important for language learners to achieve fluency in speaking, but students often lack sufficient opportunities to practice their conversational skills with qualified instructors or native speakers. To bridge this gap, we propose situational dialogue models for students to engage in conversational practice. Our situational dialogue models are fine-tuned on large language models (LLMs), with the aim of combining the engaging nature of an open-ended conversation with the focused practice of scenario-based tasks. Leveraging the generalization capabilities of LLMs, we demonstrate that our situational dialogue models perform effectively not only on training topics but also on topics not encountered during training. This offers a promising solution to support a wide range of conversational topics without extensive manual work. Additionally, research in the field of dialogue systems still lacks reliable automatic evaluation metrics, leading to human evaluation as the gold standard (Smith et al., 2022), which is typically expensive. To address the limitations of existing evaluation methods, we present a novel automatic evaluation method that employs fine-tuned LLMs to efficiently and effectively assess the performance of situational dialogue models.
University of North Carolina at Charlotte（北卡罗来纳大学夏洛特分校）
Emotional language generation is one of the keys to human-like artificial intelligence. Humans use different type of emotions depending on the situation of the conversation. Emotions also play an important role in mediating the engagement level with conversational partners. However, current conversational agents do not effectively account for emotional content in the language generation process. To address this problem, we develop a language modeling approach that generates affective content when the dialogue is situated in a given context. We use the recently released Empathetic-Dialogues cor…
SSR: Can Simulated Patients Learn to Stigmatize Themselves? Modeling Self-Stigma through Internal Monologue
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；X-LANCE Lab, Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering（X-LANCE实验室，计算机科学与工程系）；MoE Key Lab of Artificial Intelligence, AI Institute（教育部人工智能重点实验室，人工智能研究院）
This paper presents an ontology-aware pretrained language model (OPAL) for end-to-end task-oriented dialogue (TOD). Unlike chit-chat dialogue models, task-oriented dialogue models fulfill at least two task-specific modules: dialogue state tracker (DST) and response generator (RG). The dialogue state consists of the domain-slot-value triples, which are regarded as the user's constraints to search the domain-related databases. The large-scale task-oriented dialogue data with the annotated structured dialogue state usually are inaccessible. It prevents the development of the pretrained language m…
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）
Commonsense Generation and Evaluation for Dialogue Systems using Large Language Models
ETSI de Telecomunicación, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid（电信工程系，马德里理工大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Centre for Automation and Robotics UPM-CSIC（自动化与机器人中心 UPM-CSIC）；Universidad Politécnica de Madrid（马德里理工大学）
An Iterative Associative Memory Model for Empathetic Response Generation
College of Computer and Data Science, Fuzhou University（福州大学计算机与数据科学学院）；Leiden University（莱顿大学）；School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳）计算机科学与技术学院）；SmartMore（思谋科技）；College of Computer Science and Technology, Chongqing University of Technology（重庆理工大学计算机科学与工程学院）
National Taiwan University（台湾大学）；Intel Labs（英特尔研究院）
Much literature has shown that prompt-based learning is an efficient method to make use of the large pre-trained language model. Recent works also exhibit the possibility of steering a chatbot's output by plugging in an appropriate prompt. Gradient-based methods are often used to perturb the prompts. However, some language models are not even available to the public. In this work, we first explored the combination of prompting and reinforcement learning (RL) to steer models' generation without accessing any of the models' parameters. Second, to reduce the training effort and enhance the genera…
This paper presents the second version of the dialogue system named Alquist competing in Amazon Alexa Prize 2018. We introduce a system leveraging ontology-based topic structure called topic nodes. Each of the nodes consists of several sub-dialogues, and each sub-dialogue has its own LSTM-based model for dialogue management. The sub-dialogues can be triggered according to the topic hierarchy or a user intent which allows the bot to create a unique experience during each session.
User Satisfaction Estimation (USE) is an important yet challenging task in goal-oriented conversational systems. Whether the user is satisfied with the system largely depends on the fulfillment of the user's needs, which can be implicitly reflected by users' dialogue acts. However, existing studies often neglect the sequential transitions of dialogue act or rely heavily on annotated dialogue act labels when utilizing dialogue acts to facilitate USE. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, namely USDA, to incorporate the sequential dynamics of dialogue acts for predicting user satisfaction…
University of Potsdam（波茨坦大学）；Department of Linguistics（语言学系）；Computational Linguistics（计算语言学）
Where early work on dialogue in Computational Linguistics put much emphasis on dialogue structure and its relation to the mental states of the dialogue participants (e.g., Allen 1979, Grosz & Sidner 1986), current work mostly reduces dialogue to the task of producing at any one time a next utterance; e.g. in neural chatbot or Visual Dialogue settings. As a methodological decision, this is sound: Even the longest journey is a sequence of steps. It becomes detrimental, however, when the tasks and datasets from which dialogue behaviour is to be learned are tailored too much to this framing of the…
University of California, Santa Barbara（加州大学圣塔芭芭拉分校）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）
Dialogue generation has been successfully learned from scratch by neural networks, but tends to produce the same general response, e.g., "what are you talking about?", in many conversations. To reduce this homogeneity, external knowledge such as the speaker's profile and domain knowledge is applied as an additional condition to diversify a model's output. The required knowledge to develop an effective conversation, however, is not always available, which is different from prior work's assumption that a model always has acquired sufficient knowledge before chatting. This problem can be detrimen…
Task-oriented dialogue systems in industry settings need to have high conversational capability, be easily adaptable to changing situations and conform to business constraints. This paper describes a 3-step procedure to develop a conversational model that satisfies these criteria and can efficiently scale to rank a large set of response candidates. First, we provide a simple algorithm to semi-automatically create a high-coverage template set from historic conversations without any annotation. Second, we propose a neural architecture that encodes the dialogue context and applicable business con…
This paper investigates the application of machine learning (ML) techniques to enable intelligent systems to learn multi-party turn-taking models from dialogue logs. The specific ML task consists of determining who speaks next, after each utterance of a dialogue, given who has spoken and what was said in the previous utterances. With this goal, this paper presents comparisons of the accuracy of different ML techniques such as Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE), Support Vector Machines (SVM), and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) architectures, with and without utterance data. We present thr…
Generating diverse, interesting responses to chitchat conversations is a problem for neural conversational agents. This paper makes two substantial contributions to improving diversity in dialogue generation. First, we propose a novel metric which uses Natural Language Inference (NLI) to measure the semantic diversity of a set of model responses for a conversation. We evaluate this metric using an established framework (Tevet and Berant, 2021) and find strong evidence indicating NLI Diversity is correlated with semantic diversity. Specifically, we show that the contradiction relation is more u…
Virtual assistants such as Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, and Apple Siri enable users to interact with a large number of services and APIs on the web using natural language. In this work, we investigate two methods for Natural Language Generation (NLG) using a single domain-independent model across a large number of APIs. First, we propose a schema-guided approach which conditions the generation on a schema describing the API in natural language. Our second method investigates the use of a small number of templates, growing linearly in number of slots, to convey the semantics of the API. To g…
We propose Machines Talking To Machines (M2M), a framework combining automation and crowdsourcing to rapidly bootstrap end-to-end dialogue agents for goal-oriented dialogues in arbitrary domains. M2M scales to new tasks with just a task schema and an API client from the dialogue system developer, but it is also customizable to cater to task-specific interactions. Compared to the Wizard-of-Oz approach for data collection, M2M achieves greater diversity and coverage of salient dialogue flows while maintaining the naturalness of individual utterances. In the first phase, a simulated user bot and …
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Pingan Property & Casualty Research（平安财产保险研究院）；Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）
Recently, topic-grounded dialogue system has attracted significant attention due to its effectiveness in predicting the next topic to yield better responses via the historical context and given topic sequence. However, almost all existing topic prediction solutions focus on only the current conversation and corresponding topic sequence to predict the next conversation topic, without exploiting other topic-guided conversations which may contain relevant topic-transitions to current conversation. To address the problem, in this paper we propose a novel approach, named Sequential Global Topic Att…
In this work, we explore the application of PLATO-2 on various dialogue systems, including open-domain conversation, knowledge grounded dialogue, and task-oriented conversation. PLATO-2 is initially designed as an open-domain chatbot, trained via two-stage curriculum learning. In the first stage, a coarse-grained response generation model is learned to fit the simplified one-to-one mapping relationship. This model is applied to the task-oriented conversation, given that the semantic mappings tend to be deterministic in task completion. In the second stage, another fine-grained generation model…
Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学）；Salesforce Research Asia（Salesforce亚洲研究院）；Institute for Infocomm Research, A*STAR（新加坡科技研究局资讯通信研究院）
Building an end-to-end conversational agent for multi-domain task-oriented dialogues has been an open challenge for two main reasons. First, tracking dialogue states of multiple domains is non-trivial as the dialogue agent must obtain complete states from all relevant domains, some of which might have shared slots among domains as well as unique slots specifically for one domain only. Second, the dialogue agent must also process various types of information across domains, including dialogue context, dialogue states, and database, to generate natural responses to users. Unlike the existing app…
University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）；Ahold Delhaize（阿霍德·德尔海兹）
Conversational interfaces are increasingly popular as a way of connecting people to information. Corpus-based conversational interfaces are able to generate more diverse and natural responses than template-based or retrieval-based agents. With their increased generative capacity of corpusbased conversational agents comes the need to classify and filter out malevolent responses that are inappropriate in terms of content and dialogue acts. Previous studies on the topic of recognizing and classifying inappropriate content are mostly focused on a certain category of malevolence or on single senten…
We present "AutoJudge", an automated evaluation method for conversational dialogue systems. The method works by first generating dialogues based on self-talk, i.e. dialogue systems talking to itself. Then, it uses human ratings on these dialogues to train an automated judgement model. Our experiments show that AutoJudge correlates well with the human ratings and can be used to automatically evaluate dialogue systems, even in deployed systems. In a second part, we attempt to apply AutoJudge to improve existing systems. This works well for re-ranking a set of candidate utterances. However, our e…
