Most dialog systems posit that users have figured out clear and specific goals before starting an interaction. For example, users have determined the departure, the destination, and the travel time for booking a flight. However, in many scenarios, limited by experience and knowledge, users may know what they need, but still struggle to figure out clear and specific goals by determining all the necessary slots. In this paper, we identify this challenge, and make a step forward by collecting a new human-to-human mixed-type dialog corpus. It contains 5k dialog sessions and 168k utterances for 4 dialog types and 5 domains. Within each session, an agent first provides user-goal-related knowledge to help figure out clear and specific goals, and then help achieve them. Furthermore, we propose a mixed-type dialog model with a novel Prompt-based continual learning mechanism. Specifically, the mechanism enables the model to continually strengthen its ability on any specific type by utilizing existing dialog corpora effectively.

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 (16.5k dialogs and 255k utterances in total) that are annotated by crowdsourced workers with strict quality control procedure. We then build monolingual, multilingual, and cross-lingual conversational recommendation baselines on DuRecDial 2.0. Experiment results show that the use of additional English data can bring performance improvement for Chinese conversational recommendation, indicating the benefits of DuRecDial 2.0. Finally, this dataset provides a challenging testbed for future studies of monolingual, multilingual, and cross-lingual conversational recommendation.

We focus on the study of conversational recommendation in the context of 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 DuRecDial (about 10k dialogs, 156k utterances), where there are multiple sequential dialogs for a pair of a recommendation seeker (user) and a recommender (bot). In each dialog, the recommender proactively leads a multi-type dialog to approach recommendation targets and then makes multiple recommendations with rich interaction behavior. This dataset allows us to systematically investigate different parts of the overall problem, e.g., how to naturally lead a dialog, how to interact with users for recommendation. Finally we establish baseline results on DuRecDial for future studies.