OTTers: One-turn Topic Transitions for Open-Domain Dialogue

Mixed initiative in open-domain dialogue requires a system to pro-actively introduce new topics. The one-turn topic transition task explores how a system connects two topics in a cooperative and coherent manner. The goal of the task is to generate a "bridging" utterance connecting the new topic to the topic of the previous conversation turn. We are especially interested in commonsense explanations of how a new topic relates to what has been mentioned before. We first collect a new dataset of human one-turn topic transitions, which we call OTTers. We then explore different strategies used by humans when asked to complete such a task, and notice that the use of a bridging utterance to connect the two topics is the approach used the most. We finally show how existing state-of-the-art text generation models can be adapted to this task and examine the performance of these baselines on different splits of the OTTers data.

Semantic Noise Matters for Neural Natural Language Generation

Neural natural language generation (NNLG) systems are known for their pathological outputs, i.e. generating text which is unrelated to the input specification. In this paper, we show the impact of semantic noise on state-of-the-art NNLG models which implement different semantic control mechanisms. We find that cleaned data can improve semantic correctness by up to 97%, while maintaining fluency. We also find that the most common error is omitting information, rather than hallucination.