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Towards a Human-like Open-Domain Chatbot

Daniel Adiwardana, Minh-Thang Luong, David R. So

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Jamie Hall, Noah Fiedel, Romal Thoppilan, Zi Yang, Apoorv Kulshreshtha, Gaurav Nemade, Yifeng Lu, Quoc V. Le

2020 · arXiv

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From the abstract

We present Meena, a multi-turn open-domain chatbot trained end-to-end on data mined and filtered from public domain social media conversations. This 2.6B parameter neural network is simply trained to minimize perplexity of the next token. We also propose a human evaluation metric called Sensibleness and Specificity Average (SSA), which captures key elements of a human-like multi-turn conversation. Our experiments show strong correlation between perplexity and SSA. The fact that the best perplexity end-to-end trained Meena scores high on SSA (72% on multi-turn evaluation) suggests that a human-level SSA of 86% is potentially within reach if we can better optimize perplexity. Additionally, the full version of Meena (with a filtering mechanism and tuned decoding) scores 79% SSA, 23% higher in absolute SSA than the existing chatbots we evaluated.

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3 selected excerpts · 3 total mentions

nickvincent
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Crazy impressive! A question about the training data: anyone familiar with this line of work know what social media platforms the "conversation" data component of the training set came from? There's a datasheet that points to prior work https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.09977, which sounds like it could be reddit, HN, or a similar platform?
gwern
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I previously tried an approach which uses DRL for feedback but I couldn't quite get it to work: https://www.gwern.net/GPT-2-preference-learning At the moment, it probably would be more practical to train a model to predict ratings and use that to screen generated samples or possible completions and throw out too-low-scoring ones (the 'ranker' approach worked out very well for the Meena chatbot recently: https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.09977 )

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