Much work has been done to improve persona consistency by finetuning a pretrained dialogue model on high-quality human-annoated persona datasets. However, these methods still face the challenges of high cost and poor scalability. To this end, we propose a simple-yet-effective approach to significantly improve zero-shot persona consistency via in-context learning. Specifically, we first pre-train a persona-augmented dialogue generation model and then utilize in-context prompting mechanism to realize zero-shot persona customization. Experimental results demonstrate that our method can dramatically improve persona consistency without compromising coherence and informativeness in zero-shot settings.

Dialogue contradiction is a critical issue in open-domain dialogue systems. The contextualization nature of conversations makes dialogue contradiction detection rather challenging. In this work, we propose a benchmark for Contradiction Detection in Chinese Conversations, namely CDConv. It contains 12K multi-turn conversations annotated with three typical contradiction categories: Intra-sentence Contradiction, Role Confusion, and History Contradiction. To efficiently construct the CDConv conversations, we devise a series of methods for automatic conversation generation, which simulate common user behaviors that trigger chatbots to make contradictions. We conduct careful manual quality screening of the constructed conversations and show that state-of-the-art Chinese chatbots can be easily goaded into making contradictions. Experiments on CDConv show that properly modeling contextual information is critical for dialogue contradiction detection, but there are still unresolved challenges that require future research.

Online advertisement text generation aims at generating attractive and persuasive text ads to appeal to users clicking ads or purchasing products. While pretraining-based models have achieved remarkable success in generating high-quality text ads, some challenges still remain, such as ad generation in low-resource scenarios and training efficiency for multiple ad tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel unified text ad generation framework with multi-task prompt learning, called PLATO-Ad, totackle these problems. Specifically, we design a three-phase transfer learning mechanism to tackle the low-resource ad generation problem. Furthermore, we present a novel multi-task prompt learning mechanism to efficiently utilize a single lightweight model to solve multiple ad generation tasks without loss of performance compared to training a separate model for each task. Finally, we conduct offline and online evaluations and experiment results show that PLATO-Ad significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art on both offline and online metrics. PLATO-Ad has been deployed in a leading advertising platform with 3.5% CTR improvement on search ad descriptions and 10.4% CTR improvement on feed ad titles.

Most of the open-domain dialogue models tend to perform poorly in the setting of long-term human-bot conversations. The possible reason is that they lack the capability of understanding and memorizing long-term dialogue history information. To address this issue, we present a novel task of Long-term Memory Conversation (LeMon) and then build a new dialogue dataset DuLeMon and a dialogue generation framework with Long-Term Memory (LTM) mechanism (called PLATO-LTM). This LTM mechanism enables our system to accurately extract and continuously update long-term persona memory without requiring multiple-session dialogue datasets for model training. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to conduct real-time dynamic management of persona information of both parties, including the user and the bot. Results on DuLeMon indicate that PLATO-LTM can significantly outperform baselines in terms of long-term dialogue consistency, leading to better dialogue engagingness.

To explore the limit of dialogue generation pre-training, we present the models of PLATO-XL with up to 11 billion parameters, trained on both Chinese and English social media conversations. To train such large models, we adopt the architecture of unified transformer with high computation and parameter efficiency. In addition, we carry out multi-party aware pre-training to better distinguish the characteristic information in social media conversations. With such designs, PLATO-XL successfully achieves superior performances as compared to other approaches in both Chinese and English chitchat. We further explore the capacity of PLATO-XL on other conversational tasks, such as knowledge grounded dialogue and task-oriented conversation. The experimental results indicate that PLATO-XL obtains state-of-the-art results across multiple conversational tasks, verifying its potential as a foundation model of conversational AI.

Though great progress has been made for human-machine conversation, current dialogue system is still in its infancy: it usually converses passively and utters words more as a matter of response, rather than on its own initiatives. In this paper, we take a radical step towards building a human-like conversational agent: endowing it with the ability of proactively leading the conversation (introducing a new topic or maintaining the current topic). To facilitate the development of such conversation systems, we create a new dataset named Konv where one acts as a conversation leader and the other acts as the follower. The leader is provided with a knowledge graph and asked to sequentially change the discussion topics, following the given conversation goal, and meanwhile keep the dialogue as natural and engaging as possible. Konv enables a very challenging task as the model needs to both understand dialogue and plan over the given knowledge graph. We establish baseline results on this dataset (about 270K utterances and 30k dialogues) using several state-of-the-art models. Experimental results show that dialogue models that plan over the knowledge graph can make full use of related knowledge to generate more diverse multi-turn conversations. The baseline systems along with the dataset are publicly available.