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Towards a Human-Like Open-Domain Chatbot (arxiv.org)
3 points by panarky on Jan 30, 2020 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A chatbot learns to reply by training on public social-media conversations, simply guessing the next word, and is judged by people on whether replies make sense and feel specific. Its best version scored 79% on that rating, 23 points above other chatbots.

Abstract · Towards a Human-like Open-Domain Chatbot

We present Meena, a multi-turn open-domain chatbot trained end-to-end on data mined and filtered from public domain social media conversations. This 2.6B parameter neural network is simply trained to minimize perplexity of the next token. We also propose a human evaluation metric called Sensibleness and Specificity Average (SSA), which captures key elements of a human-like multi-turn conversation. Our experiments show strong correlation between perplexity and SSA. The fact that the best perplexity end-to-end trained Meena scores high on SSA (72% on multi-turn evaluation) suggests that a human-level SSA of 86% is potentially within reach if we can better optimize perplexity. Additionally, the full version of Meena (with a filtering mechanism and tuned decoding) scores 79% SSA, 23% higher in absolute SSA than the existing chatbots we evaluated.

Daniel Adiwardana, Minh-Thang Luong, David R. So, Jamie Hall, Noah Fiedel, Romal Thoppilan, Zi Yang, Apoorv Kulshreshtha, Gaurav Nemade, Yifeng Lu, Quoc V. Le
arXiv:2001.09977 · cs.CL, cs.LG, cs.NE, stat.ML · submitted Jan 27, 2020 · updated Feb 27, 2020
abstract · pdf · html · 38 pages, 12 figures

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