A wave of new task-based virtual assistants has been fueled by increasingly powerful large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-4 (OpenAI, 2023). A major challenge in deploying LLM-based virtual conversational assistants in real world settings is ensuring they operate within what is admissible for the task. To overcome this challenge, the designers of these virtual assistants rely on an independent guardrail system that verifies the virtual assistant’s output aligns with the constraints required for the task. However, relying on commonly used, prompt-based guardrails can be difficult to engineer correctly and comprehensively. To address these challenges, we propose CONSCENDI. We use CONSCENDI to exhaustively generate training data with two key LLM-powered components: scenario-augmented generation and contrastive training examples. When generating conversational data, we generate a set of rule-breaking scenarios, which enumerate a diverse set of high-level ways a rule can be violated. This scenario-guided approach produces a diverse training set and provides chatbot designers greater control. To generate contrastive examples, we prompt the LLM to alter conversations with violations into acceptable conversations to enable fine-grained distinctions. We then use this data, generated by CONSCENDI, to train a smaller model. We find that CONSCENDI results in guardrail models that improve over baselines in multiple dialogue domains.

A medical provider’s summary of a patient visit serves several critical purposes, including clinical decision-making, facilitating hand-offs between providers, and as a reference for the patient. An effective summary is required to be coherent and accurately capture all the medically relevant information in the dialogue, despite the complexity of patient-generated language. Even minor inaccuracies in visit summaries (for example, summarizing “patient does not have a fever” when a fever is present) can be detrimental to the outcome of care for the patient. This paper tackles the problem of medical conversation summarization by discretizing the task into several smaller dialogue-understanding tasks that are sequentially built upon. First, we identify medical entities and their affirmations within the conversation to serve as building blocks. We study dynamically constructing few-shot prompts for tasks by conditioning on relevant patient information and use GPT-3 as the backbone for our experiments. We also develop GPT-derived summarization metrics to measure performance against reference summaries quantitatively. Both our human evaluation study and metrics for medical correctness show that summaries generated using this approach are clinically accurate and outperform the baseline approach of summarizing the dialog in a zero-shot, single-prompt setting.