Moya Chen

Moya Chen, Paul A. Crook, Stephen Roller

We demonstrate that large language models are able to simulate Task Oriented Dialogues in novel domains, provided only with an API implementation and a list of goals. We show these simulations can formulate online, automatic metrics that correlate well with human evaluations. Furthermore, by checking for whether the User's goals are met, we can use simulation to repeatedly generate training data and improve the quality of simulations themselves. With no human intervention or domain-specific training data, our simulations bootstrap end-to-end models which achieve a 37\% error reduction in previously unseen domains. By including as few as 32 domain-specific conversations, bootstrapped models can match the performance of a fully-supervised model with $10\times$ more data. To our knowledge, this is the first time simulations have been shown to be effective at bootstrapping models without explicitly requiring any domain-specific training data, rule-engineering, or humans-in-the-loop.

Kurt Shuster, Spencer Poff, Moya Chen et al.

Despite showing increasingly human-like conversational abilities, state-of-the-art dialogue models often suffer from factual incorrectness and hallucination of knowledge (Roller et al., 2020). In this work we explore the use of neural-retrieval-in-the-loop architectures - recently shown to be effective in open-domain QA (Lewis et al., 2020b; Izacard and Grave, 2020) - for knowledge-grounded dialogue, a task that is arguably more challenging as it requires querying based on complex multi-turn dialogue context and generating conversationally coherent responses. We study various types of architectures with multiple components - retrievers, rankers, and encoder-decoders - with the goal of maximizing knowledgeability while retaining conversational ability. We demonstrate that our best models obtain state-of-the-art performance on two knowledge-grounded conversational tasks. The models exhibit open-domain conversational capabilities, generalize effectively to scenarios not within the training data, and, as verified by human evaluations, substantially reduce the well-known problem of knowledge hallucination in state-of-the-art chatbots.