Recipes for Building an Open-Domain Chatbot
Stephen Roller, Emily Dinan, Naman Goyal, Da Ju, Mary Williamson, Yinhan Liu, Jing Xu, Myle Ott, Eric Michael Smith, Y-Lan Boureau, Jason Weston
Abstract
Building open-domain chatbots is a challenging area for machine learning research. While prior work has shown that scaling neural models in the number of parameters and the size of the data they are trained on gives improved results, we highlight other ingredients. Good conversation requires blended skills: providing engaging talking points, and displaying knowledge, empathy and personality appropriately, while maintaining a consistent persona. We show that large scale models can learn these skills when given appropriate training data and choice of generation strategy. We build variants of these recipes with 90M, 2.7B and 9.4B parameter models, and make our models and code publicly available. Human evaluations show our best models outperform existing approaches in multi-turn dialogue on engagingness and humanness measurements. We then discuss the limitations of this work by analyzing failure cases of our models.- Anthology ID:
- 2021.eacl-main.24
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume
- Month:
- April
- Year:
- 2021
- Address:
- Online
- Editors:
- Paola Merlo, Jorg Tiedemann, Reut Tsarfaty
- Venue:
- EACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 300–325
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2021.eacl-main.24
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2021.eacl-main.24
- Cite (ACL):
- Stephen Roller, Emily Dinan, Naman Goyal, Da Ju, Mary Williamson, Yinhan Liu, Jing Xu, Myle Ott, Eric Michael Smith, Y-Lan Boureau, and Jason Weston. 2021. Recipes for Building an Open-Domain Chatbot. In Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume, pages 300–325, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Recipes for Building an Open-Domain Chatbot (Roller et al., EACL 2021)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-1/2021.eacl-main.24.pdf
- Code
- facebookresearch/ParlAI + additional community code
- Data
- Blended Skill Talk, ConvAI2, Wizard of Wikipedia