Communications of the ACM
Towards a Conversational Agent that Can Chat About…Anything
Members of the Google Research Brain Team present Meena, a 2.6-billion-parameter end-to-end trained neural conversational model.
Credit: Google
Modern conversational agents (chatbots) tend to be highly specialized — they perform well as long as users don't stray too far from their expected usage. To better handle a wide variety of conversational topics, open-domain dialog research explores a complementary approach attempting to develop a chatbot that is not specialized but can still chat about virtually anything a user wants. Besides being a fascinating research problem, such a conversational agent could lead to many interesting applications, such as further humanizing computer interactions, improving foreign language practice, and making relatable interactive movie and videogame characters.
However, current open-domain chatbots have a critical flaw — they often don't make sense. They sometimes say things that are inconsistent with what has been said so far, or lack common sense and basic knowledge about the world. Moreover, chatbots often give responses that are not specific to the current context. For example, "I don't know," is a sensible response to any question, but it's not specific. Current chatbots do this much more often than people because it covers many possible user inputs.
In "Towards a Human-like Open-Domain Chatbot", we present Meena, a 2.6 billion parameter end-to-end trained neural conversational model. We show that Meena can conduct conversations that are more sensible and specific than existing state-of-the-art chatbots. Such improvements are reflected through a new human evaluation metric that we propose for open-domain chatbots, called Sensibleness and Specificity Average (SSA), which captures basic, but important attributes for human conversation. Remarkably, we demonstrate that perplexity, an automatic metric that is readily available to any neural conversational models, highly correlates with SSA.
 |
| A chat between Meena (left) and a person (right). |
Meena
Meena is an end-to-end, neural conversational model that learns to respond sensibly to a given conversational context. The training objective is to minimize perplexity, the uncertainty of predicting the next token (in this case, the next word in a conversation). At its heart lies the Evolved Transformer seq2seq architecture, a Transformer architecture discovered by evolutionary neural architecture search to improve perplexity.
From Google AI Blog
View Full Article
No entries found