Conversation Chronicles: Towards Diverse Temporal and Relational Dynamics in Multi-Session Conversations

Jihyoung Jang, Minseong Boo, Hyounghun Kim


Abstract
In the field of natural language processing, open-domain chatbots have emerged as an important research topic. However, a major limitation of existing open-domain chatbot research is its singular focus on short single-session dialogue, neglecting the potential need for understanding contextual information in multiple consecutive sessions that precede an ongoing dialogue. Among the elements that compose the context in multi-session conversation settings, the time intervals between sessions and the relationships between speakers would be particularly important. Despite their importance, current research efforts have not sufficiently addressed these dialogical components. In this paper, we introduce a new 1M multi-session dialogue dataset, called Conversation Chronicles, for implementing a long-term conversation setup in which time intervals and fine-grained speaker relationships are incorporated. Following recent works, we exploit a large language model to produce the data. The extensive human evaluation shows that dialogue episodes in Conversation Chronicles reflect those properties while maintaining coherent and consistent interactions across all the sessions. We also propose a dialogue model, called ReBot, which consists of chronological summarization and dialogue generation modules using only around 630M parameters. When trained on Conversation Chronicles, ReBot demonstrates long-term context understanding with a high human engagement score.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.838
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
13584–13606
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.838
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.838
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jihyoung Jang, Minseong Boo, and Hyounghun Kim. 2023. Conversation Chronicles: Towards Diverse Temporal and Relational Dynamics in Multi-Session Conversations. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 13584–13606, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Conversation Chronicles: Towards Diverse Temporal and Relational Dynamics in Multi-Session Conversations (Jang et al., EMNLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.838.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.838.mp4