Jack Urbanek


2022

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Am I Me or You? State-of-the-Art Dialogue Models Cannot Maintain an Identity
Kurt Shuster | Jack Urbanek | Arthur Szlam | Jason Weston
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022

State-of-the-art dialogue models still often stumble with regards to factual accuracy and self-contradiction. Anecdotally, they have been observed to fail to maintain character identity throughout discourse; and more specifically, may take on the role of their interlocutor. In this work we formalize and quantify this deficiency, and show experimentally through human evaluations that this is indeed a problem. In contrast, we show that discriminative models trained specifically to recognize who is speaking can perform well; and further, these can be used as automated metrics. Finally, we evaluate a wide variety of mitigation methods, including changes to model architecture, training protocol, and decoding strategy. Our best models reduce mistaken identity issues by nearly 65% according to human annotators, while simultaneously improving engagingness. Despite these results, we find that maintaining character identity still remains a challenging problem.

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Reason first, then respond: Modular Generation for Knowledge-infused Dialogue
Leonard Adolphs | Kurt Shuster | Jack Urbanek | Arthur Szlam | Jason Weston
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

Large language models can produce fluent dialogue but often hallucinate factual inaccuracies. While retrieval-augmented models help alleviate this issue, they still face a difficult challenge of both reasoning to provide correct knowledge and generating conversation simultaneously. In this work, we propose a modular model, Knowledge to Response (K2R), for incorporating knowledge into conversational agents, which breaks down this problem into two easier steps. K2R first generates a knowledge sequence, given a dialogue context, as an intermediate step. After this “reasoning step”, the model then attends to its own generated knowledge sequence, as well as the dialogue context, to produce a final response. In detailed experiments, we find that such a model hallucinates less in knowledge-grounded dialogue tasks, and has advantages in terms of interpretability and modularity. In particular, it can be used to fuse QA and dialogue systems together to enable dialogue agents to give knowledgeable answers, or QA models to give conversational responses in a zero-shot setting.

2021

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How to Motivate Your Dragon: Teaching Goal-Driven Agents to Speak and Act in Fantasy Worlds
Prithviraj Ammanabrolu | Jack Urbanek | Margaret Li | Arthur Szlam | Tim Rocktäschel | Jason Weston
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

We seek to create agents that both act and communicate with other agents in pursuit of a goal. Towards this end, we extend LIGHT (Urbanek et al. 2019)—a large-scale crowd-sourced fantasy text-game—with a dataset of quests. These contain natural language motivations paired with in-game goals and human demonstrations; completing a quest might require dialogue or actions (or both). We introduce a reinforcement learning system that (1) incorporates large-scale language modeling-based and commonsense reasoning-based pre-training to imbue the agent with relevant priors; and (2) leverages a factorized action space of action commands and dialogue, balancing between the two. We conduct zero-shot evaluations using held-out human expert demonstrations, showing that our agents are able to act consistently and talk naturally with respect to their motivations.

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Dialogue in the Wild: Learning from a Deployed Role-Playing Game with Humans and Bots
Kurt Shuster | Jack Urbanek | Emily Dinan | Arthur Szlam | Jason Weston
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

2020

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Queens are Powerful too: Mitigating Gender Bias in Dialogue Generation
Emily Dinan | Angela Fan | Adina Williams | Jack Urbanek | Douwe Kiela | Jason Weston
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Social biases present in data are often directly reflected in the predictions of models trained on that data. We analyze gender bias in dialogue data, and examine how this bias is not only replicated, but is also amplified in subsequent generative chit-chat dialogue models. We measure gender bias in six existing dialogue datasets before selecting the most biased one, the multi-player text-based fantasy adventure dataset LIGHT, as a testbed for bias mitigation techniques. We consider three techniques to mitigate gender bias: counterfactual data augmentation, targeted data collection, and bias controlled training. We show that our proposed techniques mitigate gender bias by balancing the genderedness of generated dialogue utterances, and find that they are particularly effective in combination. We evaluate model performance with a variety of quantitative methods—including the quantity of gendered words, a dialogue safety classifier, and human assessments—all of which show that our models generate less gendered, but equally engaging chit-chat responses.

2019

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Learning to Speak and Act in a Fantasy Text Adventure Game
Jack Urbanek | Angela Fan | Siddharth Karamcheti | Saachi Jain | Samuel Humeau | Emily Dinan | Tim Rocktäschel | Douwe Kiela | Arthur Szlam | Jason Weston
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

We introduce a large-scale crowdsourced text adventure game as a research platform for studying grounded dialogue. In it, agents can perceive, emote, and act whilst conducting dialogue with other agents. Models and humans can both act as characters within the game. We describe the results of training state-of-the-art generative and retrieval models in this setting. We show that in addition to using past dialogue, these models are able to effectively use the state of the underlying world to condition their predictions. In particular, we show that grounding on the details of the local environment, including location descriptions, and the objects (and their affordances) and characters (and their previous actions) present within it allows better predictions of agent behavior and dialogue. We analyze the ingredients necessary for successful grounding in this setting, and how each of these factors relate to agents that can talk and act successfully.

2018

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Personalizing Dialogue Agents: I have a dog, do you have pets too?
Saizheng Zhang | Emily Dinan | Jack Urbanek | Arthur Szlam | Douwe Kiela | Jason Weston
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Chit-chat models are known to have several problems: they lack specificity, do not display a consistent personality and are often not very captivating. In this work we present the task of making chit-chat more engaging by conditioning on profile information. We collect data and train models to (i)condition on their given profile information; and (ii) information about the person they are talking to, resulting in improved dialogues, as measured by next utterance prediction. Since (ii) is initially unknown our model is trained to engage its partner with personal topics, and we show the resulting dialogue can be used to predict profile information about the interlocutors.