What makes a good conversation? How controllable attributes affect human judgments

Abigail See, Stephen Roller, Douwe Kiela, Jason Weston


Abstract
A good conversation requires balance – between simplicity and detail; staying on topic and changing it; asking questions and answering them. Although dialogue agents are commonly evaluated via human judgments of overall quality, the relationship between quality and these individual factors is less well-studied. In this work, we examine two controllable neural text generation methods, conditional training and weighted decoding, in order to control four important attributes for chit-chat dialogue: repetition, specificity, response-relatedness and question-asking. We conduct a large-scale human evaluation to measure the effect of these control parameters on multi-turn interactive conversations on the PersonaChat task. We provide a detailed analysis of their relationship to high-level aspects of conversation, and show that by controlling combinations of these variables our models obtain clear improvements in human quality judgments.
Anthology ID:
N19-1170
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Jill Burstein, Christy Doran, Thamar Solorio
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1702–1723
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1170
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N19-1170
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Abigail See, Stephen Roller, Douwe Kiela, and Jason Weston. 2019. What makes a good conversation? How controllable attributes affect human judgments. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), pages 1702–1723, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
What makes a good conversation? How controllable attributes affect human judgments (See et al., NAACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1170.pdf
Presentation:
 N19-1170.Presentation.pdf
Poster:
 N19-1170.Poster.pdf
Video:
 https://vimeo.com/359676375
Code
 additional community code
Data
ConvAI2