Despite their widespread adoption, neural conversation models have yet to exhibit natural chat capabilities with humans. In this research, we examine user utterances as causes and generated responses as effects, recognizing that changes in a cause should produce a different effect. To further explore this concept, we have compiled and expanded upon a new dataset called CausalDialogue through crowd-sourcing. This dataset includes multiple cause-effect pairs within a directed acyclic graph (DAG) structure. Our analysis reveals that traditional loss functions can struggle to effectively incorporate the DAG structure, leading us to propose a causality-enhanced method called Exponential Maximum Average Treatment Effect (ExMATE) to enhance the impact of causality at the utterance level in training neural conversation models. To evaluate the effectiveness of this approach, we have built a comprehensive benchmark using the CausalDialogue dataset leveraging large-scale pre-trained language models, and have assessed the results through both human and automatic evaluation metrics for coherence, diversity, and agility. Our findings show that current techniques are still unable to effectively address conversational DAGs, and that the ExMATE method can improve the diversity and agility of conventional loss functions while maintaining coherence.

Chit-chat models are known to have several problems: they lack specificity, do not display a consistent personality and are often not very captivating. In this work we present the task of making chit-chat more engaging by conditioning on profile information. We collect data and train models to (i) condition on their given profile information; and (ii) information about the person they are talking to, resulting in improved dialogues, as measured by next utterance prediction. Since (ii) is initially unknown, our model is trained to engage its partner with personal topics, and we show the resulting dialogue can be used to predict profile information about the interlocutors.

Nowadays, the current neural network models of dialogue generation(chatbots) show great promise for generating answers for chatty agents. But they are short-sighted in that they predict utterances one at a time while disregarding their impact on future outcomes. Modelling a dialogue's future direction is critical for generating coherent, interesting dialogues, a need that has led traditional NLP dialogue models that rely on reinforcement learning. In this article, we explain how to combine these objectives by using deep reinforcement learning to predict future rewards in chatbot dialogue. The model simulates conversations between two virtual agents, with policy gradient methods used to reward sequences that exhibit three useful conversational characteristics: the flow of informality, coherence, and simplicity of response (related to forward-looking function). We assess our model based on its diversity, length, and complexity with regard to humans. In dialogue simulation, evaluations demonstrated that the proposed model generates more interactive responses and encourages a more sustained successful conversation. This work commemorates a preliminary step toward developing a neural conversational model based on the long-term success of dialogues.

预先接受训练的语言模型的最新进展具有显着改善的神经反应生成。但是，现有方法通常将对话背景视为令牌的线性序列，并通过令牌级自我关注学习生成下一个单词。这些令牌级编码阻碍了话语中话语水平一致性的探索。本文介绍了对话贝特，这是一种新的会话响应生成模型，可以增强以前的基于PLM的对话模型。 DialogBert采用分层变压器架构。为了有效地捕捉话语中的话语水平一致性，我们提出了两种培训目标，包括蒙面的话语回归和分布式话语秩序与原始BERT训练相比。在三个多转对谈话数据集上的实验表明，在定量评估方面，我们的方法非常优于BART和Dialogpt等基线。人类评估表明，DialogBert比具有显着利润率的基线产生更加连贯，信息和人类的反应。

Due to the lack of human resources for mental health support, there is an increasing demand for employing conversational agents for support. Recent work has demonstrated the effectiveness of dialogue models in providing emotional support. As previous studies have demonstrated that seekers' persona is an important factor for effective support, we investigate whether there are benefits to modeling such information in dialogue models for support. In this paper, our empirical analysis verifies that persona has an important impact on emotional support. Therefore, we propose a framework for dynamically inferring and modeling seekers' persona. We first train a model for inferring the seeker's persona from the conversation history. Accordingly, we propose PAL, a model that leverages persona information and, in conjunction with our strategy-based controllable generation method, provides personalized emotional support. Automatic and manual evaluations demonstrate that our proposed model, PAL, achieves state-of-the-art results, outperforming the baselines on the studied benchmark. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/chengjl19/PAL.

In open-domain dialogue intelligent agents should exhibit the use of knowledge, however there are few convincing demonstrations of this to date. The most popular sequence to sequence models typically "generate and hope" generic utterances that can be memorized in the weights of the model when mapping from input utterance(s) to output, rather than employing recalled knowledge as context. Use of knowledge has so far proved difficult, in part because of the lack of a supervised learning benchmark task which exhibits knowledgeable open dialogue with clear grounding. To that end we collect and release a large dataset with conversations directly grounded with knowledge retrieved from Wikipedia. We then design architectures capable of retrieving knowledge, reading and conditioning on it, and finally generating natural responses. Our best performing dialogue models are able to conduct knowledgeable discussions on open-domain topics as evaluated by automatic metrics and human evaluations, while our new benchmark allows for measuring further improvements in this important research direction.

Natural Language Generation (NLG) represents a large collection of tasks in the field of NLP. While many of these tasks have been tackled well by the cross-entropy (CE) loss, the task of dialog generation poses a few unique challenges for this loss function. First, CE loss assumes that for any given input, the only possible output is the one available as the ground truth in the training dataset. In general, this is not true for any task, as there can be multiple semantically equivalent sentences, each with a different surface form. This problem gets exaggerated further for the dialog generation task, as there can be multiple valid responses (for a given context) that not only have different surface forms but are also not semantically equivalent. Second, CE loss does not take the context into consideration while processing the response and, hence, it treats all ground truths with equal importance irrespective of the context. But, we may want our final agent to avoid certain classes of responses (e.g. bland, non-informative or biased responses) and give relatively higher weightage for more context-specific responses. To circumvent these shortcomings of the CE loss, in this paper, we propose a novel loss function, CORAL, that directly optimizes recently proposed estimates of human preference for generated responses. Using CORAL, we can train dialog generation models without assuming non-existence of response other than the ground-truth. Also, the CORAL loss is computed based on both the context and the response. Extensive comparisons on two benchmark datasets show that the proposed methods outperform strong state-of-the-art baseline models of different sizes.

在口头对话系统中，我们的目标是部署人工智能，以建立可以与人类交流的自动化对话剂。对话系统越来越多地旨在超越仅仅模仿对话，而且随着时间的推移，这些交互也会改善。在本次调查中，我们概述了多年来制定对话系统的方法的广泛概述。对话系统的不同用例范围从基于任务的系统到开放域聊天动机和需要特定的系统。从简单的规则的系统开始，研究已经朝着越来越复杂的建筑培训，这些建筑在大规模的数据集语料库中培训，如深度学习系统。激进了类似人类对话的直觉，通过加强学习将情绪纳入自然语言发生器的进展。虽然我们看到对某些指标的高度边际改善的趋势，但我们发现指标存在有限的理由，评估实践并不统一。要得出结论，我们标志着这些问题并突出了可能的研究方向。

最先进的对话模型仍然对事实准确性和自我矛盾甚至困难。轶事，他们已被观察到在整个话语中未能维持性质身份;更具体地，可能会涉及其对话者的作用。在这项工作中，我们正规化和量化这种缺陷，并通过人类评估实验表明这确实是一个问题。相比之下，我们展示了专门识别谁在谈话的歧视模型可以表现良好;此外，这些可以用作自动指标。最后，我们评估了各种缓解方法，包括模型架构，培训协议和解码策略的变化。根据人类的注释者，我们最好的车型减少了近65％的误认为是近65％，同时提高了参与度。尽管有这些结果，但我们发现维持性格身份仍然是一个具有挑战性的问题。

Knowledge-grounded dialogue systems powered by large language models often generate responses that, while fluent, are not attributable to a relevant source of information. Progress towards models that do not exhibit this issue requires evaluation metrics that can quantify its prevalence. To this end, we introduce the Benchmark for Evaluation of Grounded INteraction (BEGIN), comprised of 12k dialogue turns generated by neural dialogue systems trained on three knowledgegrounded dialogue corpora. We collect human annotations assessing the extent to which the models' responses can be attributed to the given background information. We then use BEGIN to analyze eight evaluation metrics. We find that these metrics rely on spurious correlations, do not reliably distinguish attributable abstractive responses from unattributable ones, and perform substantially worse when the knowledge source is longer. Our findings underscore the need for more sophisticated and robust evaluation metrics for knowledge-grounded dialogue. We make BEGIN publicly available at https://github.com/ google/BEGIN-dataset.

个性化对话代理对于对话系统非常重要，以产生更具体，一致，并从事和吸引力的反应。然而，大多数当前对话的个性化方法依赖于推理期间的明确人物描述，严重限制其应用。在本文中，我们提出了一种新颖的方法，该方法将根据对话历史来预测人物信息，以个性化对话代理而不依赖于推理期间的任何明确的人格描述。 Personachat数据集上的实验结果表明，当在对话剂的预测轮廓上调节（即“自身角色”）时，所提出的方法可以提高所产生的响应的一致性，并在预测的角色调节时改善所产生的响应的接合对话伙伴（即“他们的角色”）。我们还发现培训的角色预测模型可以成功转移到其他数据集，并帮助生成更相关的响应。

重复是一种反应，可以在对话中重复上一位演讲者的话语中的单词。如语言研究所述，重复对于与他人建立信任至关重要。在这项工作中，我们专注于重复生成。据我们所知，这是解决重复产生的第一种神经方法。我们提出了加权标签平滑，一种平滑方法，用于明确学习在微调过程中重复哪些单词，以及一种重复评分方法，可以在解码过程中输出更合适的重复。我们进行了自动和人类评估，涉及将这些方法应用于预先训练的语言模型T5来产生重复。实验结果表明，我们的方法在两种评估中都超过了基线。

We have a Christmas gift for Harry Potter fans all over the world. In this paper, we present Harry Potter Dialogue (HPD), a dataset that helps train Harry Potter-like dialogue agents. Such a task is typically viewed as a variant of personalized dialogue agents, but they differ significantly in three respects: 1) Harry lived in a virtual world of wizards, thus, real-world commonsense may not apply to Harry's conversations; 2) Harry's behavior is strongly linked to background information in conversations: the scene, its attributes and its relationship to other speakers; and 3) Such backgrounds are dynamically altered as the storyline goes on. The HPD dataset, as the first dataset to facilitate the study of dialogue agent construction for characters within a story, provides rich contextual information about each dialogue session such as scenes, character attributes, and relations. More importantly, all the background information will change over the course of the story. In addition, HPD could support both dialogue generation and retrieval tasks. We evaluate baselines such as Dialog-GPT and BOB to determine the extent to which they can generate Harry Potter-like responses. The experimental results disappoint us in that although the generated responses are fluent, they still seem out of character for Harry. Besides, we validate the current most robust dialogue agent, ChatGPT, which also can't generate plausible Harry-Potter-like responses in some cases, either. Our results suggest that there is much scope for future research.

许多古典童话，小说和剧本都利用对话来推进故事情节并建立角色。我们提出了第一个研究，以探索机器是否可以理解和产生故事中的对话，这需要捕获不同角色的特征及其之间的关系。为此，我们提出了两项​​新任务，包括蒙版对话生成和对话演讲者的认可，即分别产生对话转弯和预测说话者的指定对话转弯。我们构建了一个新的数据集拨号故事，该数据集由105K中国故事组成，其中包含大量对话，以支持评估。我们通过对拨号故事进行自动和手动评估测试现有模型来显示提出的任务的困难。此外，我们建议学习明确的角色表示，以提高这些任务的绩效。广泛的实验和案例研究表明，我们的方法可以产生更连贯和信息丰富的对话，并获得比强基础更高的说话者识别精度。

We develop a high-quality multi-turn dialog dataset, DailyDialog, which is intriguing in several aspects. The language is human-written and less noisy. The dialogues in the dataset reflect our daily communication way and cover various topics about our daily life. We also manually label the developed dataset with communication intention and emotion information. Then, we evaluate existing approaches on DailyDialog dataset and hope it benefit the research field of dialog systems 1 .

通过社交媒体评论预先培训的许多开放域对话模型都可以产生连贯的答复，但在与真实用户互动时会产生引人入胜的答复。这种现象可能主要是由于注释的人类对话的不足以及与人类偏爱的未对准。在本文中，我们提出了一种新颖而有效的方法，以增强开放域聊天机器人，其中有两种人类反馈（包括明确的演示和隐性偏好），并利用了。通过要求注释者选择或修改模型生成的候选响应，Diamante有效地收集了人类证明的响应并构建了中国聊天数据集。为了增强与人类偏好的一致性，Diamante利用数据收集过程中的隐含偏好，并引入了生成评估联合培训。全面的实验表明，Diamante数据集和联合培训范式可以显着提高中国预训练的对话模型的性能。

We present SODA: the first publicly available, million-scale high-quality social dialogue dataset. Using SODA, we train COSMO: a generalizable conversation agent outperforming previous best-performing agents on both in- and out-of-domain datasets. In contrast to most existing crowdsourced, small-scale dialogue corpora, we distill 1.5M socially-grounded dialogues from a pre-trained language model (InstructGPT; Ouyang et al., 2022). Dialogues are distilled by contextualizing social commonsense knowledge from a knowledge graph (Atomic10x; West et al., 2022). Human evaluation shows that dialogues in SODA are more consistent, specific, and (surprisingly) natural than prior human-authored datasets - e.g., DailyDialog (Li et al., 2017), BlendedSkillTalk (Smith et al., 2020). In addition, extensive evaluations show that COSMO is significantly more natural and consistent on unseen datasets than best-performing dialogue models - e.g., GODEL (Peng et al., 2022), BlenderBot (Roller et al., 2021), DialoGPT (Zhang et al., 2020). Furthermore, it is sometimes even preferred to the original human-written gold responses. We make our data, models, and code public.

The goal of building dialogue agents that can converse with humans naturally has been a long-standing dream of researchers since the early days of artificial intelligence. The well-known Turing Test proposed to judge the ultimate validity of an artificial intelligence agent on the indistinguishability of its dialogues from humans'. It should come as no surprise that human-level dialogue systems are very challenging to build. But, while early effort on rule-based systems found limited success, the emergence of deep learning enabled great advance on this topic. In this thesis, we focus on methods that address the numerous issues that have been imposing the gap between artificial conversational agents and human-level interlocutors. These methods were proposed and experimented with in ways that were inspired by general state-of-the-art AI methodologies. But they also targeted the characteristics that dialogue systems possess.

We propose a novel task, G4C (Goal-driven Guidance Generation in Grounded Communication), for studying goal-driven and grounded natural language interactions. Specifically, we choose Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) -- a role-playing game consisting of multiple player characters and a Dungeon Master (DM) who collaborate to achieve a set of goals that are beneficial to the players -- as a testbed for this task. Here, each of the player characters is a student, with their own personas and abilities, and the DM is the teacher, an arbitrator of the rules of the world and responsible for assisting and guiding the students towards a global goal. We propose a theory-of-mind-inspired methodology for training such a DM with reinforcement learning (RL), where a DM: (1) learns to predict how the players will react to its utterances using a dataset of D&D dialogue transcripts; and (2) uses this prediction as a reward function providing feedback on how effective these utterances are at guiding the players towards a goal. Human and automated evaluations show that a DM trained with RL to generate guidance by incorporating a theory-of-mind of the players significantly improves the players' ability to achieve goals grounded in their shared world.

Long-range context modeling is crucial to both dialogue understanding and generation. The most popular method for dialogue context representation is to concatenate the last-$k$ previous utterances. However, this method may not be ideal for conversations containing long-range dependencies. In this work, we propose DialoGX, a novel encoder-decoder based framework for conversational response generation with a generalized and explainable context representation that can look beyond the last-$k$ utterances. Hence the method is adaptive to conversations with long-range dependencies. The main idea of our approach is to identify and utilize the most relevant historical utterances instead of the last-$k$ utterances in chronological order. We study the effectiveness of our proposed method on both dialogue generation (open-domain) and understanding (DST) tasks. DialoGX achieves comparable performance with the state-of-the-art models on DailyDialog dataset. We also observe performance gain in existing DST models with our proposed context representation strategy on MultiWOZ dataset. We justify our context representation through the lens of psycholinguistics and show that the relevance score of previous utterances agrees well with human cognition which makes DialoGX explainable as well.