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arXiv · 2204.10591

SalesBot: Transitioning from Chit-Chat to Task-Oriented Dialogues

Ssu Chiu·Maolin Li·Yen-Ting Lin·Yun-Nung Chen
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Abstract

Dialogue systems are usually categorized into two types, open-domain and task-oriented. The first one focuses on chatting with users and making them engage in the conversations, where selecting a proper topic to fit the dialogue context is essential for a successful dialogue. The other one focuses on a specific task instead of casual talks, e.g., finding a movie on Friday night, or playing a song. These two directions have been studied separately due to their different purposes. However, how smoothly transitioning from social chatting to task-oriented dialogues is important for triggering business opportunities, and there is no public data focusing on such scenarios. Hence, this paper focuses on investigating the conversations starting from open-domain social chatting and then gradually transitioning to task-oriented purposes, and releases a large-scale dataset with detailed annotations for encouraging this research direction. To achieve this goal, this paper proposes a framework to automatically generate many dialogues without human involvement, in which any powerful open-domain dialogue generation model can be easily leveraged. The human evaluation shows that our generated dialogue data has a natural flow at a reasonable quality, showing that our released data has a great potential of guiding future research directions and commercial activities. Furthermore, the released models allow researchers to automatically generate unlimited dialogues in the target scenarios, which can greatly benefit semi-supervised and unsupervised approaches.

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Ssu Chiu, Maolin Li, Yen-Ting Lin, Yun-Nung Chen. 2022-04-22. SalesBot: Transitioning from Chit-Chat to Task-Oriented Dialogues. https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.10591

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