The Dialogue Dodecathlon: Open-Domain Knowledge and Image Grounded Conversational Agents

April 28, 2020

Abstract

We introduce dodecaDialogue: a set of 12 tasks that measures if a conversational agent can communicate engagingly with personality and empathy, ask questions, answer questions by utilizing knowledge resources, discuss topics and situations, and perceive and converse about images. By multi-tasking on such a broad large-scale set of data, we hope to both move towards and measure progress in producing a single unified agent that can perceive, reason and converse with humans in an open-domain setting. We show that such multi-tasking improves over a BERT pre-trained baseline, largely due to multi-tasking with very large dialogue datasets in a similar domain, and that the multi-tasking in general provides gains to both text and image-based tasks using several metrics in both the fine-tune and task transfer settings. We obtain state-of-the-art results on many of the tasks, providing a strong baseline for this challenge.

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AUTHORS

Written by

Jason Weston

Dexter Ju

Emily Dinan

Kurt Shuster

Stephen Roller

Y-Lan Boureau

Publisher

ACL

Research Topics

Natural Language Processing (NLP)

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