Can You Put it All Together: Evaluating Conversational Agents’ Ability to Blend Skills

Eric Michael Smith, Mary Williamson, Kurt Shuster, Jason Weston, Y-Lan Boureau


Abstract
Being engaging, knowledgeable, and empathetic are all desirable general qualities in a conversational agent. Previous work has introduced tasks and datasets that aim to help agents to learn those qualities in isolation and gauge how well they can express them. But rather than being specialized in one single quality, a good open-domain conversational agent should be able to seamlessly blend them all into one cohesive conversational flow. In this work, we investigate several ways to combine models trained towards isolated capabilities, ranging from simple model aggregation schemes that require minimal additional training, to various forms of multi-task training that encompass several skills at all training stages. We further propose a new dataset, BlendedSkillTalk, to analyze how these capabilities would mesh together in a natural conversation, and compare the performance of different architectures and training schemes. Our experiments show that multi-tasking over several tasks that focus on particular capabilities results in better blended conversation performance compared to models trained on a single skill, and that both unified or two-stage approaches perform well if they are constructed to avoid unwanted bias in skill selection or are fine-tuned on our new task.
Anthology ID:
2020.acl-main.183
Volume:
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Dan Jurafsky, Joyce Chai, Natalie Schluter, Joel Tetreault
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2021–2030
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.183
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.183
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Eric Michael Smith, Mary Williamson, Kurt Shuster, Jason Weston, and Y-Lan Boureau. 2020. Can You Put it All Together: Evaluating Conversational Agents’ Ability to Blend Skills. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 2021–2030, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Can You Put it All Together: Evaluating Conversational Agents’ Ability to Blend Skills (Smith et al., ACL 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.183.pdf
Video:
 http://slideslive.com/38929292
Code
 additional community code
Data
Blended Skill TalkConvAI2Wizard of Wikipedia