Abstract
A good conversation requires balance – between simplicity and detail; staying on topic and changing it; asking questions and answering them. Although dialogue agents are commonly evaluated via human judgments of overall quality, the relationship between quality and these individual factors is less well-studied. In this work, we examine two controllable neural text generation methods, conditional training and weighted decoding, in order to control four important attributes for chit-chat dialogue: repetition, specificity, response-relatedness and question-asking. We conduct a large-scale human evaluation to measure the effect of these control parameters on multi-turn interactive conversations on the PersonaChat task. We provide a detailed analysis of their relationship to high-level aspects of conversation, and show that by controlling combinations of these variables our models obtain clear improvements in human quality judgments.- Anthology ID:
- N19-1170
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)
- Month:
- June
- Year:
- 2019
- Address:
- Minneapolis, Minnesota
- Editors:
- Jill Burstein, Christy Doran, Thamar Solorio
- Venue:
- NAACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 1702–1723
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/N19-1170
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/N19-1170
- Cite (ACL):
- Abigail See, Stephen Roller, Douwe Kiela, and Jason Weston. 2019. What makes a good conversation? How controllable attributes affect human judgments. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), pages 1702–1723, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- What makes a good conversation? How controllable attributes affect human judgments (See et al., NAACL 2019)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/N19-1170.pdf
- Code
- additional community code
- Data
- ConvAI2