Topical-chat: Towards knowledge-grounded open-domain conversations

Karthik Gopalakrishnan, Behnam Hedayatnia, Qinlang Chen, Anna Gottardi, Sanjeev Kwatra, Anu Venkatesh, Raefer Gabriel, Dilek Hakkani-Tür

Research output: Contribution to journalConference articlepeer-review

Abstract

Building socialbots that can have deep, engaging open-domain conversations with humans is one of the grand challenges of artificial intelligence (AI). To this end, bots need to be able to leverage world knowledge spanning several domains effectively when conversing with humans who have their own world knowledge. Existing knowledge-grounded conversation datasets are primarily stylized with explicit roles for conversation partners. These datasets also do not explore depth or breadth of topical coverage with transitions in conversations. We introduce Topical-Chat, a knowledge-grounded human-human conversation dataset where the underlying knowledge spans 8 broad topics and conversation partners don't have explicitly defined roles, to help further research in open-domain conversational AI. We also train several state-of-the-art encoder-decoder conversational models on Topical-Chat and perform automated and human evaluation for benchmarking.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)1891-1895
Number of pages5
JournalProceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH
Volume2019-September
DOIs
StatePublished - 2019
Externally publishedYes
Event20th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association: Crossroads of Speech and Language, INTERSPEECH 2019 - Graz, Austria
Duration: Sep 15 2019Sep 19 2019

Keywords

  • Dialogue systems
  • Knowledge grounding
  • Response generation
  • Social conversations

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Language and Linguistics
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Signal Processing
  • Software
  • Modeling and Simulation

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