View publication

In light of recent advances in large language models (LLMs), the expectations for the next generation of virtual assistants include enhanced naturalness and adaptability across diverse usage scenarios. However, the creation of high-quality annotated data for Task-Oriented Dialog (TOD) is recognized to be slow and costly. To address these challenges, we introduce Task-Oriented Automatic Dialogs (TOAD), a novel and scalable TOD dataset along with its automatic generation pipeline. The TOAD dataset simulates realistic app context interaction and provide a variety of system response style options. Two aspects of system response styles are considered, verbosity level and users' expression mirroring. We benchmark TOAD on two response generation tasks, and the results show that modeling more verbose responses or responses without user expression mirroring is more challenging.

Related readings and updates.

Prompting for a Conversation: How to Control a Dialog Model?

Dialog modelling faces a difficult trade-off. Models are trained on a large amount of text, yet their responses need to be limited to a desired scope and style of a dialog agent. Because the datasets used to achieve the former contain language that is not compatible with the latter, pre-trained dialog models are fine-tuned on smaller curated datasets. However, the fine-tuning process robs them of the ability to produce diverse responses…
See paper details

Providing Insights for Open-Response Surveys via End-to-End Context-Aware Clustering

Teachers often conduct surveys in order to collect data from a predefined group of students to gain insights into topics of interest. When analyzing surveys with open-ended textual responses, it is extremely time-consuming, labor-intensive, and difficult to manually process all the responses into an insightful and comprehensive report. In the analysis step, traditionally, the teacher has to read each of the responses and decide on how to group…
See paper details