Understanding and predicting user dissatisfaction in a neural generative chatbot

Abigail See, Christopher Manning


Abstract
Neural generative dialogue agents have shown an increasing ability to hold short chitchat conversations, when evaluated by crowdworkers in controlled settings. However, their performance in real-life deployment – talking to intrinsically-motivated users in noisy environments – is less well-explored. In this paper, we perform a detailed case study of a neural generative model deployed as part of Chirpy Cardinal, an Alexa Prize socialbot. We find that unclear user utterances are a major source of generative errors such as ignoring, hallucination, unclearness and repetition. However, even in unambiguous contexts the model frequently makes reasoning errors. Though users express dissatisfaction in correlation with these errors, certain dissatisfaction types (such as offensiveness and privacy objections) depend on additional factors – such as the user’s personal attitudes, and prior unaddressed dissatisfaction in the conversation. Finally, we show that dissatisfied user utterances can be used as a semi-supervised learning signal to improve the dialogue system. We train a model to predict next-turn dissatisfaction, and show through human evaluation that as a ranking function, it selects higher-quality neural-generated utterances.
Anthology ID:
2021.sigdial-1.1
Volume:
Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
Month:
July
Year:
2021
Address:
Singapore and Online
Editors:
Haizhou Li, Gina-Anne Levow, Zhou Yu, Chitralekha Gupta, Berrak Sisman, Siqi Cai, David Vandyke, Nina Dethlefs, Yan Wu, Junyi Jessy Li
Venue:
SIGDIAL
SIG:
SIGDIAL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1–12
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.sigdial-1.1
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.sigdial-1.1
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Abigail See and Christopher Manning. 2021. Understanding and predicting user dissatisfaction in a neural generative chatbot. In Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 1–12, Singapore and Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Understanding and predicting user dissatisfaction in a neural generative chatbot (See & Manning, SIGDIAL 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.sigdial-1.1.pdf
Video:
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j50NQ1U5WYk