In plain words: A chat model is pre-trained with a hidden "reply type" tag so it can pick among many possible answers instead of one, learning by generating replies and guessing the tag at once. It outperformed standard chat models on three kinds of conversation data.
Abstract · PLATO: Pre-trained Dialogue Generation Model with Discrete Latent Variable
Pre-training models have been proved effective for a wide range of natural language processing tasks. Inspired by this, we propose a novel dialogue generation pre-training framework to support various kinds of conversations, including chit-chat, knowledge grounded dialogues, and conversational question answering. In this framework, we adopt flexible attention mechanisms to fully leverage the bi-directional context and the uni-directional characteristic of language generation. We also introduce discrete latent variables to tackle the inherent one-to-many mapping problem in response generation. Two reciprocal tasks of response generation and latent act recognition are designed and carried out simultaneously within a shared network. Comprehensive experiments on three publicly available datasets verify the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed framework.
Siqi Bao, Huang He, Fan Wang, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang
arXiv:1910.07931 · cs.CL · submitted Oct 17, 2019 · updated Apr 30, 2020
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted for publication at ACL2020. First two authors contributed equally